Despite asking for a slight spending increase for fiscal 2013 over current funding levels, the Energy Department says it is tightening its belt across the board -- and it is starting by retracting a number of grants awarded through the high-profile Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

The agency's leaders this afternoon said it had rescinded grant money from six ARPA-E projects to the tune of "several million dollars" because the projects failed to meet yearly milestones.

Arun Majumdar, the two-and-a-half-year-old agency's director and DOE's undersecretary for energy, refused to give details about the specific projects that received the funding cuts.

"Unless the company wants to speak about it, it is confidential at this point," he told reporters this afternoon after a briefing on DOE's $27.2 billion fiscal 2013 budget request at DOE's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

An aide said the agency would verify with legal advisers whether additional information could be made public. That information was not available in time for publication.

The ARPA-E grants aren't the only ones being cut. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the agency had retracted money from 29 other research projects funded through the agency's Office of Fossil Energy and its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy because they did not reach research milestones.

"An old adage I tell all my students that I learned when I was about 30 years old is: It's OK to fail, but do it fast and move on," Chu said this afternoon.

The savings from the retracted ARPA-E grants will go back into the general Treasury because those projects were some of the ones funded through the 2009 stimulus law that helped get ARPA-E up and running. Any additional rescissions -- which Majumdar said were likely -- would go back into DOE's discretionary funds.

In addition to the retracted grants, the agency is slashing spending for a number of in-house research programs, especially those that promote energy technologies that are nearing commercialization.

The agency is proposing to scale back funding for a sodium-ion battery program because that technology is already on track to being deployed. It is also reducing funding for offshore wind energy research.

"That's getting to be a commercial technology," Chu said. "It's becoming very competitive with other forms of new energy."

The funding request for the agency's hydropower research and development program is 66 percent lower than the $59 million Congress enacted for the current fiscal year.

And the hydropower industry isn't impressed. "The program's work is far from complete. The past few years of investment developing more efficient and environmentally friendly turbines, reducing the costs of small hydropower technology and promoting the integration of variable energy resources, will be wasted if Congress enacts this budget proposal," Linda Church Ciocci, executive director of the National Hydropower Association, said in a statement.

But research projects and programs are not the only areas seeing funding cuts within the agency's budget request. Departmental administration budgets would be down nearly 3 percent under the request. And Chu touted a number of steps the agency was taking to save money within its operational budget.

For one, the agency is now buying nonrefundable airline tickets for employee travel. Previously, the agency required employees and contractors to purchase refundable tickets, which are often more expensive. DOE is reducing its vehicle fleet at its Washington, D.C., headquarters by 35 percent. And it is requiring employees to print documents on both sides of a piece of paper.

"We're trying to live within our means here," said Owen Barwell, deputy chief financial officer for the agency. "We've got pretty flat budgets for all departments that help run the department."