Trump Admin: Clean-Energy Grants Were Canceled Based on Politics

The Trump administration has acknowledged in court documents that it canceled $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects "based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state" -- in this case, 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. The statement contradicts repeated assertions by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other officials that the projects were canceled because they did not adequately advance the nation's energy needs or had other problems that made them a poor investment of taxpayer money. Democrats and environmental groups seized on the court filing Friday, saying the administration had used the federal government's power to kill good jobs and punish workers because of their political views. "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," said Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state. The Department of Energy announced last October that 321 funding awards across 223 projects were terminated. The cuts, part of President Donald Trump's broader rollback of climate programs, slashed federal support for projects to build battery plants, develop hydrogen technology, upgrade the electric grid, and capture carbon emissions. Russell Vought, White House budget director, highlighted the cutbacks in a social media post, saying money "to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled." Government lawyers had previously confirmed in a court filing late last year that the selection of grants in fact "was influenced by whether a grantee's address was located in a State that tends to elect ... Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called "Blue States")." The most recent admission came in a case called Thakur v. Trump. Federal lawyers acknowledged that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy, and COVID-19 to screen for projects that ran afoul of the Trump administration's priorities.