Trump administration admits canceling clean energy grants to Democratic states

The Trump administration has admitted scrapping more than $7.5bn in federal grants for clean energy projects to states “based solely” on whether they backed Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

US federal officials appeared to acknowledge in court documents last week that they had terminated the funding last October “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris.

The administration previously framed the move as safeguarding taxpayer dollars from “waste” and continues to insist it was not politically motivated.

“[The Department of Energy] accepts that neither the inclusion of the ARCHES grant nor any other grants in the October notice tranche was based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” government lawyers said in the filing.

“[The Department of Energy] accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, ie, whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.

“[The Department of Energy] will not contend that it looked beyond the prime grantee(s) to consider the political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries of the grant funds.”

The apparent admission was first reported by the New York Times.

In a statement on Friday, a spokesperson for the US energy department said of the report: “That is a misrepresentation of the court filing. None of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.”

The acknowledgment of political considerations “was referring to the timing of the announcement, not of the decisions themselves”, the spokesperson claimed.

The filings stem from a lawsuit, filed last June, by a group of six University of California faculty and other researchers challenging various federal agencies that halted Biden-era funding.

The plaintiffs said in a press release at the time that the abrupt cancellations of already-awarded grants had been a part of a “political ‘cost-cutting’ agenda and ideological purity campaign” waged by the administration.

It comes as the White House seeks to exert even greater control over billions of dollars in annual federal grants, aiming to have Trump’s political appointees review all federal grants, with the power to block or revoke vast amounts of funding if they did not conform to or align with Trump’s priorities.

According to a 400-page proposed rule for federal financial assistance published on 29 May, “Discretionary awards must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”

They must also adhere to further standards set out by the White House, including not promoting “anti-American values”, the denial of “the sex binary in humans” and the use of “racial preferences” in selection criterion.

Per last week’s court filing, the energy department had reviewed its financial assistance awards and created a list last September that recommended canceling more than 600 grants awarded by the Biden administration for a wide range of clean energy projects in states represented by both Republicans and Democrats.

However, in October, the White House budget office, led by Russell Vought, terminated only 284 of those grants. Vought announced on X: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled. The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”

Last week, federal officials appeared to concede that the decision had been purely informed by politics. “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 (“Blue State” grants),” the court filing says.

Meanwhile, the energy department left in place hundreds of other energy grants in state represented by Republicans and that had voted for Trump in 2024 – despite the department having also recommended that they too be scrapped.

Last month, Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, appeared before the House science, space and technology committee to defend his department’s fiscal 2027 budget request. “No decisions were made on politics,” he insisted.

The Guardian has reached out to the White House.