The Trump administration has 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 grants involved projects in 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
The admission conflicts with repeated statements by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other officials that the projects were canceled because they did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable or had other problems that made them poor investments of taxpayer money. Wright described the cancellations as “business decisions” based on whether projects were a good use of taxpayer funds.
Scope of the cancellations
The Energy Department announced last October that 321 funding awards across 223 projects had been terminated. The canceled projects included efforts to build battery plants, develop hydrogen technology, upgrade the electric grid and capture carbon dioxide emissions. The projects 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.
The cancellations were challenged in court. More than two dozen Democratic members of Congress, led by California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, asked the Energy Department’s acting inspector general to investigate. The department’s internal watchdog opened an investigation in December. Government lawyers had previously said in a separate court filing that grant selection “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”).”
The most recent admission came in Thakur v. Trump, a case that has been ongoing since last spring. Federal lawyers also acknowledged that keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 were used to screen projects that conflicted with the Trump administration’s priorities. Democrats and environmental groups criticized the cancellations. Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state said, “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.” The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.