When the Energy Department canceled more than $7.5 billion in clean energy grants last October, it presented the move as a housecleaning. The department's announcement said a review had found the projects did not adequately advance the nation's energy needs or were not economically viable, and it billed the terminations as a saving for taxpayers.
In a court filing this month, a lawyer for the department described the process differently.
"With one exception," the filing states, "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 same lawyer acknowledged that none of the grants were included in the October terminations "based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor," according to the filing, which was first reported by The New York Times. The government also confirmed that hundreds of additional energy grants in states represented by Republicans were left in place even though the Energy Department had recommended canceling them.
What was cut
The October terminations hit projects that had been funded under Biden-era energy programs: battery manufacturing, hydrogen technology, electric grid upgrades and carbon capture, among others. The Energy Department's own announcement at the time described 223 projects and savings of more than $7.5 billion; court records refer to 284 terminated grants, a difference that reflects how awards were counted rather than a change in scope.
The cuts were announced at the start of last year's government shutdown.
A court had already ruled
The July filing is not the first time the political pattern has been examined. In January, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the Energy Department had violated the Fifth Amendment's equal protection guarantee in a case brought by plaintiffs including the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the Environmental Defense Fund.
"The only identifiable difference — the grant recipient's state's political identity and, specifically, its electoral votes cast against President Trump — does not provide a rational basis for why Defendants chose to terminate Plaintiffs' grants over others to advance their stated interest of aligning grant funding with agency priorities," Mehta wrote.
This month's filing came in separate litigation, in federal court in California, and states the government's position in its own words rather than a judge's.
The larger fight over grant money
The Times framed the episode as part of a broader effort to give the White House more say over federal spending. The Office of Management and Budget is finishing a set of rules that would give the president greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants.
Supporters of that effort argue it restores accountability over money that agencies distribute with limited presidential oversight, and that an elected administration is entitled to align discretionary spending with its own priorities. Critics argue the rules would make it easier to withhold funding Congress has already appropriated, and that the equal-protection problem identified in January is exactly what a broader rule would replicate at scale.
The administration has had mixed results defending these actions. It has persuaded the Supreme Court to route some challenges over grant terminations to the Court of Federal Claims, a more favorable forum. Courts have been less receptive when the question is whether a funding condition or cancellation was lawful in the first place.
What happens next
The California case is ongoing, and the January ruling ordered relief for the plaintiffs in that separate suit rather than for every canceled grant. The Energy Department has not publicly revised its October characterization of the terminations, and the administration has continued to defend its authority to set grant priorities.
What has changed is the record. The government's stated reason for the cuts in October and the reason its lawyer gave a court in July are not the same reason, and the second one is now in writing.
