Trump administration officials admitted in court that they canceled hundreds of federal grants simply because they benefited states Kamala Harris won in 2024.
That stunning acknowledgment, which contradicts what the administration said last fall when canceling upwards of $7.5 billion in funds, came in court documents this month, The New York Times reported. Several grant awardees had sued over the cancellations, and as a result, the Trump administration’s weaponization of all sorts of aid is now coming into fuller view.
Last year, the Energy Department presented the White House Budget Office with a list of more than 600 Biden-era grants in blue and red states that it said should be canceled. But in October, the budget office, under 50-year-old Director Russ Vought, canceled 284 of those grants. Of them, 283 were in blue states.
“With one exception, 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,” an Energy Department lawyer wrote in a July 15 filing.
None of the grants were canceled “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” the lawyer added. Rather, it was purely political.
“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State,” the lawyer admitted.
The Times reports that axed projects included electrical grid upgrades in California, as well as clean-burning hydrogen fuel hubs in the Golden State, where Gov. Gavin Newsom is a vocal Trump foe.
Newsom, 58, responded Friday on X to the news.
“The corrupt Trump administration has just admitted to withholding taxpayer dollars from states based on how they voted,” he wrote. “Last I checked we were a democracy, not a dictatorship. Where the hell is Congress?”
Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, a ranking member on the GOP-led Senate appropriations committee, and Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who sits on the House’s top energy appropriations panel, issued a statement calling the cuts “outright un-American.”
“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. 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,” they said.
The pair also criticized Energy Secretary Chris Wright, 61, who said at a House hearing in June that “no decisions were made on politics.” Accusations to the contrary, he insisted then, were “b------t.”
“Secretary Wright swore up and down for months that these project terminations had absolutely nothing to do with politics, and now his lawyers are declaring that, in fact, politics was the only consideration,” the lawmakers said in their statement. “Weaponizing the Federal government like this is outright un-American, and it’s hardworking families already struggling with sky-high costs who are suffering the consequences of this corrupt abuse of power.”
Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told the Times in response to the filing, “There is no contradiction, and any suggestion of a contradiction is a misrepresentation of the court filing.”
The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast, nor did the White House.
