In a stunning admission, the Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing last week that it whittled down a list of more than 600 clean energy project grants by only terminating the ones in states that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
The July 15 filing, made in a case challenging the Trump administration’s cancellation of Biden-era grants, indicates the Department of Energy compiled a list of 624 grants to axe last fall before the White House Office of Management and Budget trimmed it in half, sparing projects in red states from losing federal funding.
“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators,” Jeff Novak, the principal deputy general counsel of the Department of Energy, wrote in the filing.
“The remaining approximately 340 grants proposed for termination were not terminated in October 2025, and they have not since been terminated,” Novak continued.
“All such grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to President Trump in the 2024 election or has at least one Republican-caucusing Senator.”
OMB Director Russ Vought announced the cuts in an X post last October, which named “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA” as the states where project funding was affected.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from [DOE],” Vought wrote.
Democrats contend the filing demonstrates that Trump administration officials “corruptly abused their power” to terminate grants solely on the basis of the political identity of the states receiving federal money.
“This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: it terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, said in a joint statement.
“This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views,” they added.
The lawmakers further fumed that Energy Secretary Chris Wright “swore up and down for months that these project terminations had absolutely nothing to do with politics, and now his lawyers are declaring that, in fact, politics was the only consideration.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Energy told the New York Times that “there is no contradiction” between Wright’s testimony to Congress and the court filing.
“Weaponizing the federal government like this is outright un-American, and it’s hardworking families already struggling with sky-high costs who are suffering the consequences of this corrupt abuse of power,’ the Democratic pols continued.
“It’s good that several courts have already ruled against the terminations, and it’s high time Republicans join us to hold this administration accountable for the president’s failure to look out for all Americans.”
The White House and Department of Energy did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
