Washington financed $12.13 billion in EV battery plants. Then the credit that was supposed to sell their output ended.

Two federal decisions, four years apart, now sit next to each other in the same three states.▸ In 2022 and 2024, the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office committed a combined $12.13 billion to build American battery-cell manufacturing for electric vehicles. In 2025, Congress ended the consumer tax credit that gave car buyers a reason to buy those batteries — seven years ahead of its original schedule. Both decisions are matters of public record. So are the layoffs that followed.

The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office closed a $2.5 billion loan to Ultium Cells — the General Motors/LG Energy Solution joint venture — in December 2022, its first loan closed exclusively for a battery-cell manufacturing project.▸ It financed three plants, in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan, and DOE projected the buildout would create more than 11,000 jobs: 6,000 in construction and 5,100 in operations. Two years later, in December 2024, the same office closed a $9.63 billion loan to BlueOval SK — the Ford Motor Company/SK On joint venture — the single largest loan the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program has ever issued. It funded up to three plants, one in Stanton, Tennessee and two in Glendale, Kentucky, with DOE citing more than 5,000 construction jobs and "up to 7,500 BOSK operations jobs" once running.

Both loans were underwritten against a demand curve that assumed EV buyers would keep getting help paying for the product.▸ That help had a name: the Section 30D new clean vehicle credit, worth up to $7,500 per car, alongside a $4,000 credit for used EVs (Section 25E) and a credit worth up to $40,000 per vehicle for commercial buyers (Section 45W).

Public Law 119-21 — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025 — terminated all three clean-vehicle credits for any vehicle acquired after September 30, 2025, with no grandfathering for existing orders.▸ The IRS's own FAQ on the change confirms the cutoff: a vehicle had to be under binding contract with payment made on or before September 30, 2025, to still qualify. The credit had originally been scheduled to run through 2032 under the Inflation Reduction Act — the same law-adjacent policy environment DOE's loan projections were built on. Ending it seven years early did not just remove a rebate; it removed the mechanism that made the battery plants' projected sales volumes plausible.

The first layoff notice landed 29 days after the credit expired.▸ On October 29, 2025, General Motors notified the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services that it would lay off 1,334 hourly UAW Local 1112 members at the Ultium Cells plant in Warren, Ohio, effective January 5, 2026. GM CEO Mary Barra tied the decision directly to the company "assessing our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint" after the credit's expiration, according to the WARN filing's reporting. On December 16, 2025, BlueOval SK filed WARN Notice #2737 with the Kentucky Center for Statistics, a closure notice for 1,514 employees at its Glendale, Kentucky plant, as Ford dissolved the joint venture and retooled the site away from EV batteries. On March 5, 2026, BlueOval SK filed a third notice, this one with the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development, for 150 workers at its Stanton, Tennessee plant, effective May 5, 2026.

That's 2,998 workers across three separate state WARN systems — not a nationwide count of every EV-sector layoff since September 2025, just the filings tied to these two federally financed ventures.▸ Two of the three notices are plant closures, not temporary furloughs. None of the three companies' public statements name the tax credit's expiration as the sole cause — Ford's Glendale filing describes a retooling toward stationary battery storage — but GM's own executives put the credit's end in the same sentence as the layoff decision, and all three notices landed within the same six-month window that started the day the credit stopped applying to new sales.

The $12.13 billion loan figure and the 2,998 layoff figure are counted as of the sources cited — both are point-in-time totals for two specific joint ventures, not comprehensive figures for the DOE's full ATVM portfolio or the U.S. EV-battery sector as a whole.