Trump administration admits grants for clean energy were canceled based on politics

WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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 dollars. Democrats and environmental groups seized on the court filing Friday, saying the administration had "weaponized" the federal government to kill good jobs and punish working families 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 Energy Department announced last October that 321 funding awards across 223 projects were terminated. The cuts, part of broader attacks from President Donald Trump on climate programs and clean energy funding, slashed federal support for projects to build battery plants, develop hydrogen technology, upgrade the electric grid and capture carbon dioxide emissions. Russell Vought, the White House budget director, highlighted the cutbacks in a social media post, saying money "to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled." Projects that were cut were located in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state. The cuts were immediately challenged in court, and more than two dozen Democratic members of Congress, led by California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, wrote a letter to the Energy Department's acting inspector general requesting a formal investigation. The department's internal watchdog launched an investigation in December. 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')." That filing came in a separate suit filed by clean energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, over the canceled funding. The most recent admission came in a case called Thakur v. Trump that's been ongoing since last spring. 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.