When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.
But it wasn’t true.
In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.
The stunning admission offered an unvarnished glimpse into the way President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.
The saga illustrates the stakes as the Trump administration is completing a set of rules that would provide the president even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants. To critics, the new regulation would only make it easier for Mr. Trump to strike wider tranches of congressionally approved funding over political differences.
“The risk that the Trump administration is willing to go to extreme lengths to politicize grant-making is not a hypothetical,” said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning group. He previously served at the White House budget office under former President Joseph R. Biden.
“If they are willing to be that blatant about it,” Mr. O’Connor said of the court filing, “then I think we should take seriously when they put forward a framework that would allow for the extreme politicization of grant-making across all of the federal government.”
The White House and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The administration’s latest concession about the grants came in a lawsuit filed by a group of California researchers challenging various federal agencies that have canceled Biden-era funding.
After reviewing its spending, the Energy Department last fall created a list that recommended canceling more than 600 grants awarded by the Biden administration for a wide range of novel energy projects. That list included funding for projects in states represented by both Republicans and Democrats.
But in October, the White House budget office, led by Russell T. Vought, terminated only 284 of those grants. In a social media post announcing the news, Mr. Vought pointed to the motivations: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” he said.
Months later, in court filings, federal officials indicated there was little else that had informed the final decision about which grants to cancel.
“With one exception,” a lawyer for the Energy Department conceded in a court filing this month, “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.”
The lawyer acknowledged that none of the grants were included in the October terminations “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”
In contrast, the administration left untouched hundreds of additional energy grants in states that were represented by Republicans and had backed Mr. Trump in the last election, even though the Energy Department had recommended canceling them, the government confirmed in the July court filing.
The cancellations coincided with a broader White House effort at the time to pressure Democratic lawmakers to cave in a fight over funding that had shut down the government. That month, Mr. Trump had vocalized the strategy: He threatened openly to slash what he described as “Democrat agencies,” while Mr. Vought announced a series of additional spending cuts targeting other Democratic-led states.
As a result, the administration’s actions halted funding for hundreds of energy projects, including upgrades to electrical grids in states like California 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. Some awardees later sued the Trump administration in an effort to restore their grants.
Federal officials offered the new details about the grant cancellations as part of an agreement with plaintiffs meant to spare the government an exhaustive, evidence-uncovering process known as discovery, the court filings said. That process could have required federal agencies to hand over more damaging records.
The agreement applied to other federal agencies targeted by the lawsuit, including the Department of Transportation and the Department of Health and Human Services. Some agencies later revealed new details about the ways in which they reviewed their grants — using specific keywords tied to Mr. Trump’s political priorities and past directives — for possible cancellations, according to additional court documents this month. Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment.
The filings also appeared to undermine the congressional testimony of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who spoke about the cancellations in a June House hearing: “No decisions were made on politics.”
The Energy Department had previously conceded in two other cases that politics had been a “primary reason” for the cancellations. In those cases, Amit P. Mehta, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, eventually ruled that the agency had improperly canceled more than a dozen grants. But the latest concession is far more detailed and sweeping, and it sparked new anger on Capitol Hill.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s appropriations committee, and Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, a Democrat who leads her party on the House’s top energy appropriations panel, said in a joint statement on Friday that politically minded grant cuts amounted to an “outright un-American” weaponization of government.
“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,” they added. “This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.”
Many Democrats have raised those same concerns as the White House looks to assert even greater control over federal grants. Those proposed regulations, which are expected to be completed by October, would require Mr. Trump’s political appointees to review all federal grants, with the power block or revoke money if they do not conform to administration priorities.
The White House has also sought to layer additional restrictions on grant recipients, limiting their political activities, memberships and even their appearances at conferences, along with vague requirements that they cannot use the money for certain purposes, including those deemed “anti-American.”
The proposed rules have sparked widespread backlash from anti-poverty groups, arts practitioners, city leaders, law enforcement officials, scientists and others. These critics flooded the government with thousands of comments arguing that the measures could undermine crucial government services.
But the administration has maintained that the new rules would help to prevent waste and align federal spending with Mr. Trump priorities. Testifying at a congressional hearing this month, Mr. Vought said it would ensure “that we have democratic control of the spending that is going out.”
The post Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him appeared first on New York Times.
