The Trump administration canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants last year based exclusively on whether the recipient's state voted Democratic in the 2024 election, the U.S. Department of Energy admitted in a July 15, 2026, court filing first reported by the New York Times on Friday. The acknowledgment has sparked outrage among Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups, who say the administration is using federal funding as a political weapon. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., called the disclosure a "stunning admission" that confirms the White House is punishing voters who didn't support President Trump.
In October 2025, DOE terminated 223 clean energy project grants, every one of them in states that backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the November 2024 election. Courts have since reversed some of the cancellations. The department's court filing stated that none of the grant terminations were "based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor." Instead, the filing said, decisions about which grants to include in the October notice were made "solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state, i.e., whether the recipient's location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State." DOE offered these details as part of a deal to avoid the court's discovery process, though a department spokesperson told the New York Times that an initial review of the canceled grants had been completed without political considerations.
According to DeLauro's statement, the administration is "trying to seize complete political control over the federal funding process and use it as a weapon to advance their ideological agenda." Sierra Club Chief Program Officer Holly Bender said in a statement that "the Trump administration is brazenly admitting to a vindictive approach to cancelling much-needed energy infrastructure that ignores the job losses, air pollution, and increasing bills that people are experiencing everywhere." On Friday, Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., led a group of lawmakers urging the Office of Management and Budget to withdraw a May proposal that would give federal agencies greater control over grant decisions, shifting them away from neutral criteria and expert review toward decisions by appointed officials.
The controversy over the energy grants sits within a broader pattern of the administration tying federal dollars to political goals. The Department of Homeland Security has floated linking grants to states' cooperation with immigration enforcement. OMB's proposed rule change, filed in May, would fundamentally reshape how federal grants are awarded, according to Pettersen and her colleagues, who wrote in a letter to OMB Director Russel Vought that it represents "a sharp break from long‑standing Uniform Guidance." Democratic lawmakers and advocates argue the approach turns routine funding decisions into ideological tests, replacing merit-based evaluation with partisan loyalty checks.
The administration's use of grant cancellations to reward allies and penalize opponents threatens to upend decades of federal funding practice, where statutory requirements and agency expertise drove decisions. If OMB's proposed changes take effect, the politicization of the DOE grants could become standard procedure across the federal government. For states that voted against Trump, the message is clear: federal support now comes with a political price tag.