The Trump administration has acknowledged in a federal court proceeding that it stripped hundreds of clean-energy grants from recipient states based on those states' political identity — an admission that has drawn fierce condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and directly contradicts earlier statements from administration officials.
The July 15 filing, submitted as part of a class-action lawsuit seeking to reverse the cancellations, revealed that the Energy Department forwarded to the Office of Management and Budget a roster of more than 600 grants it recommended eliminating — all from states where former Vice President Kamala Harris carried the vote and whose Senate delegations caucus with Democrats. The Office of Management and Budget ultimately pulled the plug on 284 of those grants in October 2025.
The department's own lawyers confirmed in the filing that grant selection was driven exclusively by whether a recipient's state was, in the administration's terms, a "Blue State or a non-Blue State" — a pool of projects that OMB Director Russ Vought said amounted to nearly $8 billion. All 16 states whose grants were eliminated were governed by either a Democratic legislature or a Democratic governor. A DOE attorney disclosed in the filing that the department had initially assembled a pool of 624 grants as candidates for cancellation before the final list was narrowed down.
When the cancellations were first announced, the Energy Department publicly justified them by arguing the affected projects would not serve the country's energy needs and lacked economic viability. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went further, testifying before the House Appropriations Committee earlier this year that geography played no role in the review: "All of the 2,270 projects we evaluated were not evaluated in any way, shape or form based on where they were," he said, and insisted that none of the reviewers took politics into account. The July 15 filing now puts those assurances in direct tension with the department's own legal admissions.
Washington Sen. Patty Murray and Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, both Democrats, issued a joint statement charging that Wright had "swore up and down for months" that politics played no role, only for the department's attorneys to declare in court that politics "was the only consideration," and that the outcome is being borne by "hardworking families already struggling with sky-high costs." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the Energy Department's admission "unprecedented Trumpism and something we should never become numb to."
The Energy Department pushed back Friday, with spokesman Ben Dietderich telling The New York Times: "There is no contradiction, and any suggestion of a contradiction is a misrepresentation of the court filing," maintaining that the termination decisions were not driven by politics. The grant cancellations fit a pattern in Trump's second term of targeting funding in states perceived as politically opposed to the administration, including an earlier bid to freeze $10 billion in social-services money from five Democratic-leaning states — an effort that was ultimately abandoned.
The plaintiffs pressing the class-action case are a group of University of California researchers who contend the administration singled out federal grants for elimination on political rather than programmatic grounds. The litigation remains active, and the court has yet to rule on whether the administration's own admissions will compel reinstatement of the canceled funding.