The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing this week that a decision to cut energy grants during the government shutdown was influenced by whether the money would go to a state that tended to elect Democrats statewide or nationally.
Government lawyers also wrote in the filing that “consideration of partisan politics is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”
The remarkably candid admission echoes President Donald Trump’s frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops.
It could also raise the possibility that federal attorneys might make similar arguments in legal challenges to other unilateral cuts implemented by the administration for blue cities and states.
The White House budget office and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comments about the new filing.
A coalition of Minnesota clean energy groups and the city of St. Paul sued the Trump administration last month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Energy Department announced it was slashing 321 grants of about $7.5 billion. The cuts included projects to kick-start the hydrogen industry in California, upgrade the electricity grid serving Indigenous communities in New Mexico and generate new energy mostly from wind and solar in Minnesota.
At the time, Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, touted the cuts on X, declaring “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled” and listed blue states.
In their lawsuit, the Democratic city and clean energy groups argue that cuts to funding in Minnesota were entirely politically motivated. Justice Department attorneys did not agree that it was solely a political decision but instead claimed that politics was one factor.
During the record-long government shutdown that ended in November, Trump and his allies said they would target Democratic priorities and cut funding to programs in mostly Democratic-controlled states.
“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Trump told reporters in October. “We can get rid of a lot of things we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
At the same time, the government has previously been careful not to invoke political considerations in court cases about its decision-making. In an earlier filing in the same St. Paul case, government attorneys wrote that the terminations were “part of a months-long review process by DOE, and the grant terminations made as part of this review process include entities located in both ‘Red States’ and ‘Blue States’ alike.”
The Monday filing marked the first time the government had acknowledged in the court documents that politics was a factor.
Legal experts said the administration’s statement marks a significant departure from legal norms in which agencies have traditionally steered clear of pointing to partisanship in such cases.
“It really undermines the idea that you’re passing neutral laws that you know are supposed to apply equally to everybody,” said Dan Farber, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley. “I find it really startling they would make that concession.”
The groups are alleging that the administration violated their First Amendment rights by targeting a state that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said the free speech claim could chart a new course for grantees impacted by cuts after the Supreme Court previously rejected an effort to restore research funding through the National Institutes of Health based on the argument that the cuts were arbitrary and capricious.
“I cannot believe that the Supreme Court would want to allow a partisan tit-for-tat to develop with each party pulling grants from its perceived partisan foes, but one can never be entirely certain these days,” Super wrote in an email.
Eric Schickler, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said the administration may make the argument that politics can be a proxy for policy considerations in other instances where blue states are systematically disadvantaged, especially if it proves successful in this case. Farber, however, said that the blue cities and states suing the administration could use this latest concession against them in legal attacks.
“I believe this is likely a preview of a strategy that the administration will adopt more broadly if the courts go along with it,” Schickler said.
The admission aligned with what some Energy Department employees noticed over the past several months in the cancellation of grants, according to an employee there who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
“One of the most important factors deciding which projects get canceled is what state is the performer in,” the worker said. “Is it in a blue or a red state?”
A few times, he and his co-workers tried to make the system work to their advantage.
They would take a project with an original location of New York or California and try to find ways to move the same work to Iowa or Georgia — anywhere tinged red. The original recipient of the project was often bummed, he said, but willing to try to salvage the federal funding and the project, even if it went to someone else. It’s not yet clear if that strategy will pan out, he said.
“The work is fine, the administration likes the work, they just don’t like the person doing it,” he said. “It sucks, but it’s better to have the work happen.”
Nicolás Rivero and Jake Spring contributed to this report.
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