Excerpts:

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

The saga illustrates the stakes as the Trump administration is completing a set of rules that would provide the president even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants. To critics, the new regulation would only make it easier for Mr. Trump to strike wider tranches of congressionally approved funding over political differences.

The administration’s latest concession about the grants came in a lawsuit filed by a group of California researchers challenging various federal agencies that have canceled Biden-era funding.

After reviewing its spending, the Energy Department last fall created a list that recommended canceling more than 600 grants awarded by the Biden administration for a wide range of novel energy projects. That list included funding for projects in states represented by both Republicans and Democrats.

In contrast, the administration left untouched hundreds of additional energy grants in states that were represented by Republicans and had backed Mr. Trump in the last election, even though the Energy Department had recommended canceling them, the government confirmed in the July court filing.

As a result, the administration’s actions halted funding for hundreds of energy projects, including upgrades to electrical grids in states like California and Oregon; efforts to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado; and large hubs to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuels in California and the Pacific Northwest. Some awardees later sued the Trump administration in an effort to restore their grants.

Federal officials offered the new details about the grant cancellations as part of an agreement with plaintiffs meant to spare the government an exhaustive, evidence-uncovering process known as discovery, the court filings said. That process could have required federal agencies to hand over more damaging records.

The filings also appeared to undermine the congressional testimony of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who spoke about the cancellations in a June House hearing: “No decisions were made on politics.”

The Energy Department previously conceded in two other cases that politics had been a “primary reason” for the cancellations. In those cases, Amit P. Mehta, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, eventually ruled that the agency had improperly canceled more than a dozen grants. But the latest concession is far more detailed and sweeping, and it sparked new anger on Capitol Hill.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s appropriations committee, and Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, a Democrat who leads her party on the House’s top energy appropriations panel, said in a joint statement on Friday that politically minded grant cuts amounted to an “outright un-American” weaponization of government.

“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,” they added. “This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.”


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/business/trump-state-grants-canceled.html

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