In new legal filings, lawyers for the Trump administration say that decisions to end nearly 300 renewable energy development grants last year were made based "solely" on whether recipients supported President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
In a filing dated July 15, lawyers representing the U.S. Department of Energy wrote that the decision to deny grant money hinged on whether the recipient was in a state that either did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election, or was represented by Democratic senators in Congress.
"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 read.
"DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based 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."
The canceled energy projects totaled close to $8 billion, according to Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The 16 states affected had either a Democratic state legislature or a Democratic governor.
At the time, the Department of Energy said it had canceled the projects because they wouldn't meet the nation's needs for energy and "were not economically viable."
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Energy Secretary Chris Wright later repeatedly testified to Congress that the decision to terminate the grants was not political:
"All of the 2,270 projects we evaluated were not evaluated in any way, shape or form based on where they were," he told the House Appropriations Committee in April of 2026. "And all of the people that worked on our project review process did not take into account any politics in the evaluation of these projects.”
Now, Democratic lawmakers have called for bipartisan efforts to address what they characterize as political motivations by the Trump administration.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) released a statement on Friday that read in part:
"Secretary Wright swore up and down for months that these project terminations had absolutely nothing to do with politics, and now his lawyers are declaring that, in fact, politics was the only consideration. Weaponizing the federal government like this is outright un-American, and it’s hardworking families already struggling with sky-high costs who are suffering the consequences of this corrupt abuse of power."
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Representatives for the Energy Department reiterated Friday that its decisions to terminate grants were not political, and said the court filing did not change that assessment:
"There is no contradiction, and any suggestion of a contradiction is a misrepresentation of the court filing," spokesman Ben Dietderich told The New York Times.
