The Trump administration's own lawyers acknowledged in a federal court filing that the Department of Energy terminated clean energy grants exclusively in states that voted for Kamala Harris, while sparing every project in states that backed the president.
Jeff Novak, the DOE's Principal Deputy General Counsel, laid out the pattern in a filing dated July 15. Of 624 grants the department initially flagged for termination, the Office of Management and Budget cut the list roughly in half. The 284 grants that were actually killed shared a common trait: with one exception, every one of them sat in a state that gave its electoral votes to Harris in 2024 and had two Democratic-caucusing senators.
The remaining 340 grants, all located in states that voted for Trump or had at least one Republican-caucusing senator, were left untouched. They have not been terminated since.
The court document, filed in a federal case challenging the terminations, does not hedge. Novak wrote:
"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."
He continued:
"The remaining approximately 340 grants proposed for termination were not terminated in October 2025, and they have not since been terminated. All such grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to President Trump in the 2024 election or has at least one Republican-caucusing Senator."
That is a DOE official, in a sworn court filing, drawing a clean line between a state's 2024 vote and whether its energy projects survived. The filing identifies the one exception but offers no further detail about which grant it was or why it broke the pattern.
The sequence matters. DOE compiled the original roster of 624 grants. OMB, under Director Russ Vought, then trimmed the list approximately in half. What remained after OMB's review were the 284 grants in blue states, and those were the ones that got the ax.
Vought announced the cancellations in an X post last October, naming 16 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Every one voted for Harris.
Vought's post called the grants "Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda." He put the price tag at nearly $8 billion. The canceled projects included up to $1.2 billion for California's hydrogen hub and up to $1 billion for a Pacific Northwest hydrogen project. Meanwhile, a hydrogen project in Texas and a tri-state project spanning West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all states friendlier to the president, were spared.
Breitbart reported that 223 projects were terminated after a DOE review concluded they did not adequately advance the nation's energy needs or were not economically viable. More than a quarter of the rescinded grants, over $3.1 billion, had been awarded between Election Day and Inauguration Day, a detail the administration has pointed to as evidence of last-minute Biden-era spending.
The filing creates a direct problem for Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Democrats say Wright spent months telling Congress that the terminations had nothing to do with politics. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations energy subcommittee, issued a joint statement framing the filing as a flat contradiction of Wright's public assurances.
Murray and Kaptur said:
"Energy Secretary Chris 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."
A DOE spokesperson pushed back, telling the New York Times that "there is no contradiction" between Wright's congressional testimony and the court filing. The spokesperson did not elaborate, and the full statement was not published beyond that phrase. The White House did not respond to the New York Post's requests for comment.
Wright himself, in earlier public remarks, had framed the cuts differently. He told reporters the decisions were "business decisions on whether it's a good use of the taxpayer money or not." That framing is difficult to square with a court filing that sorts grants not by cost-effectiveness or project merit but by which candidate a state's voters chose.
The Novak filing is not the first time the administration's sorting criteria have surfaced in court. In a separate ruling, Judge Amit Mehta found that the cancellation of $7.6 billion in clean energy grants violated the Constitution's equal protection requirements. Mehta wrote that the administration "freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily, if not exclusively, based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024." He found no rational justification for targeting grant recipients based on their electoral support.
That ruling was one of two legal setbacks for the administration's clean energy rollback in a single day. A separate judge also allowed an offshore wind farm project to resume. Murray and Kaptur noted in their joint statement that "several courts have already ruled against the terminations."
Murray and Kaptur did not hold back. Their statement called the filing "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 added:
"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."
The lawmakers called on Republicans to "join us to hold this administration accountable for the president's failure to look out for all Americans." So far, there is no indication any Republican members have taken up that invitation.
Several open questions remain. The court filing does not explain what criteria DOE used to compile its original list of 624 grants before OMB stepped in. It does not describe why one grant broke the otherwise airtight partisan pattern. And it does not address whether the 340 surviving grants in red states faced any subsequent review, or whether their survival was simply the default outcome of OMB's electoral filter.
Conservative voters who want Washington to stop shoveling money into green-energy boondoggles have every right to cheer fiscal discipline. But fiscal discipline means cutting waste wherever it sits, not running the budget through a voter file. When the government's own lawyers tell a judge that a state's electoral votes determined which grants lived and which died, that is not reform. That is the kind of selective federal power conservatives have spent decades warning about.
