Colorado is losing $550 million in federal clean energy grants as Trump administration officials slash awards to primarily Democratic-controlled states during the budget shutdown, including a highly-touted $326 million block to Colorado State University intended to create methane-cutting technologies to combat climate change. 

The Colorado Energy Office struggled Thursday to understand the magnitude of the cuts, which are part of a $7.5 billion reversal of Biden-era clean energy grants announced Wednesday night by the U.S. Department of Energy. Democrats then released a detailed list by Congressional district, including pullback of the CSU grants and a host of other funded projects for Colorado. 

The state Energy Office denounced the reversals as illegal.

The Department of Energy list that emerged Thursday “specifically targets states where a majority of Americans cast their votes in favor of the Democratic nominee for President,” a Colorado Energy Office statement said. “This clearly politically motivated targeting of grants by the administration will balloon energy costs, threaten grid reliability, increase pollution, and create instability in our business community.”

States including Colorado have successfully sued over other Trump administration cuts to Congressionally approved budget items, including money for building out fast EV chargers. 

About 34 awards in Colorado were cut in the latest round, including clean energy projects and research planned by utilities, universities and oil and gas companies. 

Among the larger awards rescinded in Colorado was a $27 million grant and loan to Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association for its energy transition; about $22 million to Pioneer Energy for managing methane emissions and develop flaring technology; and $6.5 million for United Power’s floating solar microgrid in Fort Lupton. 

The cuts also include $70 million in support for Xcel Energy’s battery storage research, which is employing so-called iron-air technology for utility scale storage of cleanly generated energy in Minnesota and Colorado.

“We are reviewing the details of the announcement to determine which DOE-funded projects we are involved in will be affected. So far, we have identified the demonstration project for long-duration, iron-air battery storage technology at coal plants in Minnesota and Colorado as being impacted,” the company said in a statement Thursday.

The state energy office itself lost two grants totaling $5 million meant to support rewrites of building codes to save energy and “decarbonize” building heating systems. “These are just two of more than 30 grants totaling more than $500 million that are being illegally terminated in Colorado alone,” the office statement said. 

“Colorado is proud to lead the nation in clean energy and consumers in our state continue to choose low cost renewable energy and clean, reliable technologies. We cannot allow China to surpass our country in these sectors,” the office statement said, though it also noted federal officials have not formally notified Colorado directly of the cuts.

“Other terminated grants in Colorado range from oil and gas methane reduction projects and investments in grid resilience to support for utility programs in low-income communities,” the statement said.

In all, 321 financial awards for 223 projects were cut across the nation. The Democratic members of the House Appropriation Committee compiled the list. 

Of the 321 awards terminated, 26% were awarded between Election Day and Inauguration Day. Those awards alone were valued at over $3.1 billion. 

“On day one, the Energy Department began the critical task of reviewing billions of dollars in financial awards, many rushed through in the final months of the Biden administration with inadequate documentation by any reasonable business standard,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in announcing the cuts.

In a post on X, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the canceled projects were in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. 

All of the states but New Hampshire and Vermont are led by Democratic governors. Both states, however, voted for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, in the 2024 presidential election.

“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Vought wrote.

Critics of the administration noted the cuts by Wright, who is from Colorado, will hit particularly hard in his home region.

“It’s hard to imagine a more cynical move than scrapping dozens of programs designed to make energy more affordable and the grid more reliable, all while talking out the other side of your mouth about a make believe ‘energy emergency,’ ” said Eric Frankowski, executive director of the Western Clean Energy Campaign. “For an energy secretary from Colorado, it’s especially troubling — because no one should better understand the economic harm and higher costs that such a reckless, partisan decision will dump onto consumers back home.”

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had offered nine schools a deal: manage your universities in a way that aligns with administration priorities and get “substantial and meaningful federal grants," along with other benefits. Failure to accept the bargain would result in a withdrawal of federal programs that would likely cripple most universities. The offer, sent to a mixture of state and private universities, would see the government dictate everything from hiring and admissions standards to grading and has provisions that appear intended to make conservative ideas more welcome on campus.

The document was sent to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia. However, independent reporting indicates that the administration will ultimately extend the deal to all colleges and universities.

Ars has obtained a copy of the proposed "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," which makes the scope of the bargain clear in its introduction. "Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits," it suggests, while mentioning that those benefits include access to fundamental needs, like student loans, federal contracts, research funding, tax benefits, and immigration visas for students and faculty.

It is difficult to imagine how it would be possible to run a major university without access to those programs, making this less a compact and more of an ultimatum.

Poorly thought through

The Compact itself would see universities agree to cede admissions standards to the federal government. The government, in this case, is demanding only the use of "objective" criteria such as GPA and standardized test scores as the basis of admissions decisions, and that schools publish those criteria on their websites. They would also have to publish anonymized data comparing how admitted and rejected students did relative to these criteria.

The micromanaging of admissions extends to foreign students, as the document warns that admitting them risks "saturating the campus with noxious values such as anti-Semitism and other anti-American values, creating serious national security risks." So every campus will have to cap foreign admissions at 15 percent of the student population. Those who are accepted will need to sit through instruction on American civics.

At the same time, the document is clearly calling for an affirmative action program for conservative ideas. "Signatories to this compact commit themselves to fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus," the Compact reads. "A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."

Other specific proposals echo those that were present in a set of demands made to Harvard: assess viewpoint diversity on campus and take steps to ensure it is present "not just in the university as a whole, but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit." Universities must also prevent anyone protesting on campus, including non-students, from disrupting classes or study, or heckling other students.

One area where viewpoint diversity isn't welcome, however, is sex and gender. "Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting 'male,' 'female,' 'woman,' and 'man' according to reproductive function and biological processes." First Amendment rights are also targeted, as anyone representing the university "will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university."

The Compact also intends to micromanage grades to ensure they "only rigorously reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject." Again, schools would be expected to post anonymized grade distributions so that grade inflation or deflation could be detected. Note that it's technically possible for entire classes to demonstrate mastery of a topic, which would, based on this standard, result in badly skewed grade distributions; there's no reason to expect that every class will produce a neat bell curve of grades. The fact that the people preparing this document don't seem aware of this provides an indication that these demands were not carefully thought through.

Also in the realm of poorly considered ideas: Any university that has an endowment that's worth more than $2 million per student will be required to give students free tuition if they're majoring in the hard sciences. Not only will that incentivize students to start in those fields and switch majors as late as possible, but it comes at a time when the administration's attacks on science and education are putting the job prospects of science majors at serious risk. Yet, at the same time, the Compact also demands that schools inform students of the earning potential of different majors.

Not real reform

There's a lot more there: demands for a five-year tuition freeze, compliance with money laundering rules for donations, hiring third parties to ensure compliance, etc. Each university will have to set up an entirely new bureaucracy to ensure that it can follow all these additional rules—in part because failure to do so will get them referred to the Department of Justice. At the same time, however, the Compact wants university administration to be reduced.

The number of demands that undercut the goals that are supposedly motivating other demands in this document make it very clear that it's not a serious attempt at educational reform. Instead, it can be best understood as part of the administration's larger campaign to cripple US universities and the science that goes on there.

As far back as 2021, now-Vice President JD Vance was saying, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” And the administration has been very blatant about pursuing that attack, using federal funding to try to force universities to make changes that have little to nothing to do with the reasons the funding was given in the first place. The Compact fits in directly with the larger campaign by giving universities a stark choice: give up control over basic university functions to this administration, or face sanctions that will essentially eliminate the ability to function as a research university.

For that research, it also represents an abandonment of the idea that the key determinant in funding should be scientific merit, a principle that has guided the US research endeavor for decades. Now, compliance with administration demands can overrule scientific merit in all circumstances, a situation that reinforces an executive order that placed the results of peer review by scientists behind political considerations evaluated by bureaucrats.

There is no way that these changes will do anything other than cripple the US research effort, with downstream impacts both domestically and globally.

Read full article

Comments

The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone lines and TV services as well as the internet.

“Right in the middle of my meetings 😒,” one users said on the r/Spectrum subreddit. Around 25,000 customers were without services for several hours as the company rushed to repair the lines. As the service came back,, WFAA reported that the cause of the outage came from the barrel of a gun. A stray bullet had hit a line of fiber optic cable and knocked tens of thousands of people offline.

“The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet,” Spectrum told 404 Media. “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn’t have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved. Texas is a massive state with overlapping police jurisdictions and a lot of guns. Finding a specific shooting incident related to telecom equipment in the vast suburban sprawl around Dallas is probably impossible.

Fiber optic cable lines are often buried underground, protected from the vagaries of southern gunfire. But that’s not always the case, fiber can be strung along telephone poles in the sky and sent to a vast and complicated network junction boxes and service stations that overlap different municipalities and cities, each with their own laws about how the cable can be installed. That can leave pieces of the physical infrastructure of the internet exposed to gunfire and other mischief.

This is not the first time gunfire has taken down the internet. In 2022, Xfinity fiber cable in Oakland, California went offline after people allegedly fired 17 rounds into the air near one of the company’s fiber lines. Around 30,000 people were offline during that outage and it happened moments before the start of an NFL game that saw the Los Angeles Rams square off against the San Francisco 49ers.

“We could not be more apologetic and sincerely upset that this is happening on a day like today,” Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Dater Center Dynamics at the time. Hammel added that the company has seen gunshot wounds on its equipment before. “While this isn’t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it.”

Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media.

The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.

“This is a statewide consumer-finance abuse that forces renters to surrender payroll and bank logins or face homelessness,” one renter who was forced to use the tool and who saw it taking more data than was necessary for their apartment application told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation from their landlord or the services used.

“I am livid,” they added.

For years, Customs and Border Protection agents have been quietly harvesting DNA from American citizens, including minors, and funneling the samples into an FBI crime database, government data shows. This expansion of genetic surveillance was never authorized by Congress for citizens, children, or civil detainees.

According to newly released government data analyzed by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, collected the DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and had it sent to CODIS, the FBI’s nationwide system for policing investigations. An estimated 95 were minors, some as young as 14. The entries also include travelers never charged with a crime and dozens of cases where agents left the “charges” field blank. In other files, officers invoked civil penalties as justification for swabs that federal law reserves for criminal arrests.

The findings appear to point to a program running outside the bounds of statute or oversight, experts say, with CBP officers exercising broad discretion to capture genetic material from Americans and have it funneled into a law-enforcement database designed in part for convicted offenders. Critics warn that anyone added to the database could endure heightened scrutiny by US law enforcement for life.

“Those spreadsheets tell a chilling story,” Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology, tells WIRED. “They show DNA taken from people as young as 4 and as old as 93—and, as our new analysis found, they also show CBP flagrantly violating the law by taking DNA from citizens without justification.”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

For more than two decades, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, has been billed as a tool for violent crime investigations. But under both recent policy changes and the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, the system has become a catchall repository for genetic material collected far outside the criminal justice system.

One of the sharpest revelations came from DHS data released earlier this year showing that CBP and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have been systematically funneling cheek swabs from immigrants—and, in many cases, US citizens—into CODIS. What was once a program aimed at convicted offenders now sweeps in children at the border, families questioned at airports, and people held on civil—not criminal—grounds. WIRED previously reported that DNA from minors as young as 4 had ended up in the FBI’s database, alongside elderly people in their 90s, with little indication of how or why the samples were taken.

The scale is staggering. According to Georgetown researchers, DHS has contributed roughly 2.6 million profiles to CODIS since 2020—far above earlier projections and a surge that has reshaped the database. By December 2024, CODIS’s “detainee” index contained over 2.3 million profiles; by April 2025, the figure had already climbed to more than 2.6 million. Nearly all of these samples—97 percent—were collected under civil, not criminal, authority. At the current pace, according to Georgetown Law’s estimates, which are based on DHS projections, Homeland Security files alone could account for one-third of CODIS by 2034.

The expansion has been driven by specific legal and bureaucratic levers. Foremost was an April 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked a long-standing waiver allowing DHS to skip DNA collection from immigration detainees, effectively green-lighting mass sampling. Later that summer, the FBI signed off on rules that let police booking stations run arrestee cheek swabs through Rapid DNA machines—automated devices that can spit out CODIS-ready profiles in under two hours.

The strain of the changes became apparent in subsequent years. Former FBI director Christopher Wray warned during Senate testimony in 2023 that the flood of DNA samples from DHS threatened to overwhelm the bureau’s systems. The 2020 rule change, he said, had pushed the FBI from a historic average of a few thousand monthly submissions to 92,000 per month—over 10 times its traditional intake. The surge, he cautioned, had created a backlog of roughly 650,000 unprocessed kits, raising the risk that people detained by DHS could be released before DNA checks produced investigative leads.

Under Trump’s renewed executive order on border enforcement, signed in January 2025, DHS agencies were instructed to deploy “any available technologies” to verify family ties and identity, a directive that explicitly covers genetic testing. This month, federal officials announced they were soliciting new bids to install Rapid DNA at local booking facilities around the country, with combined awards of up to $3 million available.

“The Department of Homeland Security has been piloting a secret DNA collection program of American citizens since 2020. Now, the training wheels have come off,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of advocacy at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “In 2025, Congress handed DHS a $178 billion check, making it the nation’s costliest law enforcement agency, even as the president gutted its civil rights watchdogs and the Supreme Court repeatedly signed off on unconstitutional tactics.”

Oversight bodies and lawmakers have raised alarms about the program. As early as 2021, the DHS inspector general found the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection and that years of noncompliance can undermine public safety—echoing an earlier rebuke from the Office of Special Counsel, which called CBP’s failures an “unacceptable dereliction.”

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Kans.) more recently pressed DHS and DOJ for explanations about why children’s DNA is being captured and whether CODIS has any mechanism to reject improperly obtained samples, saying the program was never intended to collect and permanently retain the DNA of all noncitizens, warning the children are likely to be “treated by law enforcement as suspects for every investigation of every future crime, indefinitely.”

Rights advocates allege that CBP’s DNA collection program has morphed into a sweeping genetic surveillance regime, with samples from migrants and even US citizens fed into criminal databases absent transparency, legal safeguards, or limits on retention. Georgetown’s privacy center points out that once DHS creates and uploads a CODIS profile, the government retains the physical DNA sample indefinitely, with no procedure to revisit or remove profiles when the legality of the detention is in doubt.

In parallel, Georgetown and allied groups have sued DHS over its refusal to fully release records about the program, highlighting how little the public knows about how DNA is being used, stored, or shared once it enters CODIS.

Taken together, these revelations may suggest a quiet repurposing of CODIS. A system long described as a forensic breakthrough is being remade into a surveillance archive—sweeping up immigrants, travelers, and US citizens alike, with few checks on the agents deciding whose DNA ends up in the federal government’s most intimate database.

“There’s much we still don’t know about DHS’s DNA collection activities,” Georgetown’s Glaberson says. “We’ve had to sue the agencies just to get them to do their statutory duty, and even then they’ve flouted court orders. The public has a right to know what its government is up to, and we’ll keep fighting to bring this program into the light.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Read full article

Comments

In 2014, University of California, Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley wrote a book called The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. His controversial "drunken monkey hypothesis" proposed that the human attraction to alcohol goes back about 18 million years, to the origin of the great apes, and that social communication and sharing food evolved to better identify the presence of fruit from a distance. At the time, skeptical scientists insisted that this was unlikely because chimpanzees and other primates just don't eat fermented fruit or nectar.

But reports of primates doing just that have grown over the ensuing two decades. Dudley co-authored a new paper published in the journal Science Advances reporting the first measurements of the ethanol content of fruits favored by chimps in Ivory Coast and Uganda, finding that the chimps are consuming 14 grams of alcohol every day, the equivalent of a standard alcoholic drink in the US. After adjusting for the chimps' lower body mass, the authors concluded the chimps are consuming nearly two drinks per day.

Earlier this year, we reported that researchers had caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. That observational data was the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild. They recorded 10 instances of selective fruit sharing among 17 chimps, with the animals exhibiting a marked preference for riper fruit. Between April and July 2022, the authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).

That's comparatively low to alcoholic drinks typically consumed by humans, but then again, fruit accounts for as much as 60 to 80 percent of the chimps' diet, so the amount of ethanol consumed could add up quickly. It's highly unlikely the chimps would get drunk, however. It wouldn't confer any evolutionary advantage, and, according to the authors, there is evidence in the common ancestor of African apes of a molecular mechanism that enhances the ability to metabolize alcohol.

Nearly two drinks a day

This latest study involved chimp populations at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project (Uganda) and a second site at Tai (Ivory Coast), where scientists have estimated the animals consume between 5 to 10 percent of their body weight (about 40 kilos) in fruit each day—around 45 kilograms. The authors collected fallen fruit pulp samples from both sites, packed them in airtight containers, and froze them back at base camp to keep the fruit from ripening further.

Then they quantified the ethanol concentrations using a breathalyzer, a portable gas chromatograph, and chemical testing. The Uganda fruit contained 0.32 percent ethanol, while the Ivory Coast fruit contained 0.31 percent ethanol, which might not sound like much until you consider just how much fruit they eat. And the most frequently consumed fruit at both sites had the highest ethanol content.

If anything, this is a conservative estimate, per Dudley. "If the chimps are randomly sampling ripe fruit, then that's going to be their average consumption rate, independent of any preference for ethanol," he said. "But if they are preferring riper and/or more sugar-rich fruits, then this is a conservative lower limit for the likely rate of ethanol ingestion." That's in keeping with a 2016 report that captive aye-ayes and slow lorises prefer nectar with the highest alcohol content.

“Our findings imply that our ancestors were similarly chronically exposed to dietary alcohol,” co-author Aleksey Maro, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, told New Scientist. “The drunken monkey hypothesis suggests that this exposure caused our species to evolve an association between alcohol consumption and the reward of finding fruit sugars, and explains human attraction to alcohol today.” One caveat is that apes ingest ethanol accidentally, while humans drink it deliberately.

"What we're realizing from this work is that our relationship with alcohol goes deep back into evolutionary time, probably about 30 million years," University of St. Andrews primatologist Catherine Hobaiter, who was not involved with the study, told BBC News. "Maybe for chimpanzees, this is a great way to create social bonds, to hang out together on the forest floor, eating those fallen fruits."

The next step is to sample the chimps' urine to see if it contains any alcohol metabolites, as was found in a 2022 study on spider monkeys. This will further refine estimates for how much ethanol-laden fruit the chimps eat every day. Maro spent this summer in Ngogo, sleeping in trees—protected from the constant streams by an umbrella—to collect urine samples.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adw1665 (About DOIs).

Read full article

Comments