In court documents filed the week of July 20, 2026, and first reported by The New York Times, the administration admitted it had terminated roughly $7.5 billion in clean-energy grants in October 2025 based solely on the political alignment of the states receiving them.
The admission was blunt. A Department of Energy lawyer wrote that “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.” The filing conceded the grants were not terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.” Similar grants in Republican-led states that voted for Trump were left in place even where the Department of Energy had recommended canceling them.
The admission is remarkable because the administration spent months denying exactly this. Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, an architect of Project 2025, had called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda” and singled out 16 blue states by their postal codes: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA. Only a month before the filing, Energy Secretary Chris Wright angrily told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the cuts “did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process,” calling the accusation that they targeted states politically “bullshit.”
The reason the government came clean, per the filing, was tactical: it wanted to avoid the discovery process in a lawsuit brought by California researchers, which could have forced it to hand over far more damaging internal documents.
The conduct fits a documented pattern of using federal money as a political weapon: withholding FEMA disaster aid from blue states, freezing child-care funding, and pressuring Colorado over Tina Peters' release. Directing appropriated federal funds toward or away from Americans based on how their state voted is the use of public money as a loyalty test (see Trump Denies $227 Million in Blizzard Aid to Four Blue States Two Days After Approving Aid for Six Red Ones, A Judge Blocks Trump's Freeze of $10 Billion in Child Care and Welfare Aid to Five Democratic-Led States and Trump Withheld Federal Funds From Colorado to Pressure Gov. Polis Into Commuting Tina Peters, the County Clerk Convicted of Breaching Her County's Election System).