A federal judge on Monday ruled that the Trump administration’s decision to terminate millions of dollars in clean-energy grants last fall was “unlawful” because the cuts primarily targeted Democratic-led states.
In his ruling, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that the cancellation of seven Biden-era grants for clean-energy projects, worth some $27.5 million, violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
“The terminated grants had one glaring commonality: All the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Trump in the 2024 election,” Judge Mehta wrote.
The Energy Department in October canceled more than $7.5 billion in clean-energy funding, largely in states run by Democrats. In November, a coalition of energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minn., sued the administration over seven of those terminated grants, arguing that the funding cuts were a partisan maneuver. The ruling on Monday focused just on those seven grants.
The cuts were announced by the White House on the first day of a government shutdown as the two parties fought over a federal spending bill.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, wrote in a social media post. He went on to list 16 Democratic-led states that would be affected.
The grants were part of a larger move by the Energy Department to cancel $7.5 billion for more than 220 energy projects that had been awarded by the Biden administration, including upgrades to electrical grids in California, Minnesota and Oregon; efforts to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado; and large hubs to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuels in California and the Pacific Northwest.
Most of those cuts affected companies or institutions in Democratic-controlled states, although some of the funding would have flowed to projects in Republican-led states such as Montana or South Carolina.
At the same time, billions more in Biden-era awards for similar energy projects in Republican-controlled states — such as hydrogen hubs in West Virginia, Texas and Louisiana — do not appear to have faced sharp cuts.
The Energy Department has argued that it canceled spending that did not align with the Trump administration’s priorities. But Judge Mehta wrote that the administration had “offered no plausible rational connection” between its policy priorities and the places where the cuts occurred.
In his ruling, Judge Mehta blocked the agency from terminating the seven clean-energy grants that were part of the court case, which included funding for making buildings more energy-efficient and reducing barriers for solar power. The ruling did not mention the hundreds of other grants that were also terminated by the agency.
In a statement, Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said: “We disagree with the judge’s decision and stand by our review process, which evaluated these awards individually and determined they did not meet the standards necessary to justify the continued spending of taxpayer dollars. The American people deserve a government that is accountable and responsible in managing taxpayer funds.”
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
The post Trump Cuts to Energy Projects in Blue States Were Unlawful, Judge Rules appeared first on New York Times.
