Department of Energy Admits it Canceled Grants for Blue States Just Because They Didn’t Vote for Trump

Last October the Trump administration canceled almost $8 billion in grants for clean energy projects, ostensibly to reduce federal spending and waste. In a development that will shock no one, the rationale the administration offered didn’t turn out to be the real reason for the decision. The actual reason was that the administration deliberately targeted states that voted for Kamala Harris.

As The New York Times reports, the administration just admitted it in court:

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

“With one exception,” a lawyer for the Energy Department conceded in a court filing this month, “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.”

The lawyer acknowledged that none of the grants were included in the October terminations “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.” … The filings also appeared to undermine the congressional testimony of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who spoke about the cancellations in a June House hearing: “No decisions were made on politics.”

Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice is the flashiest, and most dangerous, of his efforts to turn all of government into a vehicle to redress his own personal grievances, but it’s far from the only department being misused to punish political enemies. Still, it’s highly unusual for an agency to plainly admit it. It’s likely this concession was intended to avoid discovery, where highly damning internal communications could be revealed. By conceding the point, the administration can argue providing such evidence is unnecessary.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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