The Trump administration 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," the court documents say.
That admission contradicted 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 were not economically viable.
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. Both are high-ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Appropriations committees, respectively.
Kaptur and Murray called on congressional Republicans to join them in holding the Trump administration "accountable for the President’s failure to look out for all Americans," they said.
The Energy Department announced last October that 321 funding awards across 223 projects were terminated, saying that after review they "did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs or were not economically viable."
The 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. All 16 targeted states supported Harris, but Wright said the cuts were "business decisions" based on whether the projects were a good use of taxpayer money or not.
Government lawyers had previously confirmed in a court filing late last year that the selection of grants "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")." A separate suit by clean energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota challenged the cuts.
The most recent admission came in a case called Thakur v. Trump that has been ongoing since last spring, and federal lawyers acknowledged they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 to screen for projects that ran afoul of the administration’s priorities.
Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, said the filing shows "the Trump administration is brazenly admitting to a vindictive approach to cancelling much-needed energy infrastructure that ignores the job losses, air pollution and increasing bills that people are experiencing everywhere." She cited nearly $3 billion pledged by the Trump administration to cancel offshore wind projects in favor of fossil fuel projects such as natural gas and coal.