Trump Admin Admits It Canceled Clean Energy Funding Only for Blue States
Renewable energy projects in states that voted for Trump? Their grants were all untouched.
Photos via Unsplash, Zbynek Burival Splinter Energy
If there’s one unifying principle that unites the entire, sprawling federal government apparatus during the second Trump administration, then surely it is the fact that every department and every agency, on all levels, has seemingly been instructed to go about their business with the most petty vindictiveness possible. If you’re not doing the stated job of your department without also inflicting some kind of punishment on half of the country because they dared to participate in the democratic process and vote in 2020 and 2024, then by god, you are doing it wrong in the eyes of the President, and when he hears about it, you’re going to be shown the door and replaced by someone who will continue hurting the correct people. The latest department to admit as much in court filings? That would be the Department of Energy, which stated on the record that the hundreds of clean energy grants it canceled, worth billions of dollars, were “based solely” on whether the states those projects were in had voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
That’s it. That’s the entire criteria that went into determining which billions of dollars in grants were cut or withdrawn, and which ones remained–“which ones remained” being a status that can also be expressed as “all of the clean energy projects that happened to be located in red states.” Those solar, wind, hydro projects, etc., were found to be worthy of the continued funding. Weird!
NEW: In a stunning admission, the Trump administration admitted in court documents that it canceled billions in energy grants to states “based solely” on politics — and whether that state was represented by Democrats and backed Harris in 2024.
www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/b…
— tony romm (@tonyromm.bsky.social) 2:10 PM · Jul 24, 2026
Ironically, this actually ended up being much less grant slashing than Trump’s own Department of Energy had recommended. After being tasked to review its spending, the DoE created a list of recommended projects to cancel of more than 600 grants that had been awarded by the Biden administration for all sorts of clean energy projects, in all 50 states, regardless of political alignment. However, when it came time to announce the cuts, the White House budget office announced only 284 of the grants totaling nearly $8 billion were being terminated. The criteria: Every single grant from a blue state, none of the grants from red states. The White House’s spokesman victoriously claimed that the administration was clashing “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” but failed to mention that it would be preserving all of that “Green New Scam” funding to projects located in any state that had voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Obviously, this is because the White House did not want to be seen stripping investment and jobs from those states, because it trusts that red state voters not only do not care if the administration wantonly punishes blue states, but that its MAGA supporters actively want to see every resident of states like California, Illinois or Colorado hurt as much as possible.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, meanwhile, lied and swore through his teeth in a June House of Representatives hearing that none of the canceled grants had been politically motivated. As he put it: “No decisions were made on politics. I keep hearing that charge. It’s bullshit. We’re going to say it a million times.”
Except, whoops: Officials and attorneys of Wright’s own department admitted in more recent court filings, in response to a lawsuit from California researchers challenging their loss of funding, that politics was the sole, exclusive reason for why funding was stripped from every single one of these projects. As a Department of Energy lawyer put it in a court filing in July: “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 attorney likewise admitted that the grant terminations had not been “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”
That leaves: Pure, petty punishment! Other agencies have revealed, meanwhile, that they also determined which of their grants to terminate by using methods as broad as searching for specific keywords that smacked of “DEI” and other Trump admin catchphrases.
The smell of authoritarianism.
The WH used keyword searches (related to diversity & gender) to review $2B worth of federal grants & illegally terminated them w/o real cause. It was based on political alignment.
This is a violation of the 1st Amendment.🧵
🧪 apnews.com/article/cali…
— Princess Vimentin PhD | Cancer Biologist (@princess-vimentin.bsky.social) 3:08 PM · Jul 22, 2026
This is of course nothing new for the broader Trump administration, which has taken unequal treatment of the states to entirely new heights during his second term in office. Trump is personally approving FEMA deployments, for instance, withholding disaster aid from blue states even when they suffer far more damage in the same storm as a neighboring red state. A detail I love: The Trump-appointed official who made waves earlier this year by claiming he could see ghosts and teleport to Waffle House locations was not in fact the one denying aid to states in need, but was generally considered by his FEMA colleagues to be an effective administrator even though he was also a crazy person. Just last week, meanwhile, we’re seeing another disproportionate response, as the administration is howling over New Jersey’s admission that a technical error resulted in it registering thousands of ineligible people to vote, when the same administration ignored the same type of clerical error when it happened earlier this year in red Texas.
The message could scarcely be more clear: If you live in a state that did not vote for Donald Trump, then the federal government does not recognize that you are worthy of its services. It doesn’t matter if you’re one of the many millions of Republicans who happens to live in New York, Massachusetts or Oregon–in that case, you’re just collateral who deserves to be denied clean energy investment or disaster aid by association. That’s what you get, for living somewhat near a person who voted for Kamala Harris!
“The risk that the Trump administration is willing to go to extreme lengths to politicize grant-making is not a hypothetical,” said Devin O’Connor of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “If they are willing to be that blatant about it, then I think we should take seriously when they put forward a framework that would allow for the extreme politicization of grant-making across all of the federal government.”
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