Administration Admits It’s Canceling Federal Grants For Purely Political Reasons

from the overrun-by-bigoted-brats dept

We all know this administration is more than willing to reward “red” states and punish “blue” states. There will always be an administration official on hand to claim the incredibly transparent vindictiveness of this administration is actually just regular government business devoid of animus.

No one believes these officials, of course. And the officials mouthing these words — as Kristi Noem did while pretending ICE surges in blue states weren’t politically motivated — don’t believe them either. All that matters is that they make the correct noises when being questioned in public. Everyone knows. No one really puts much effort into pretending otherwise.

But, every so often, an admission is made that manages to pierce through the numbing effect of this administration’s daily bludgeoning of the Republic’s norms.

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 filing [PDF] by the Department of Energy doesn’t sugarcoat what happened here. This is from the DOE’s own stipulation, filed ahead of the release of documents related to its clean energy. I cannot stress this enough: this is the DOE telling everyone that it’s actions are politically motivated.

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 (“Blue State” grants).

[…]

The remaining approximately 340 grants proposed for termination were not terminated in October 2025, and they have not since been terminated. All such grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to President Trump in the 2024 election or has at least one Republican-caucusing Senator (“non-Blue State”).

That is fucking wild. Even when presenting sworn statements, the government likes to try to maintain its pretenses. In this case, it would have been the handy catch-all of “government waste,” aided and abetted by a bunch of barely pubescent incels who were given the keys to the government vault via their employment by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”

But the pretense is completely gone here. Instead, the Energy Department has issued a giant middle finger of a stipulation, telling not only the court, but the American public, that everything it did in terms of grant awards was politically motivated.

And, as if the preceding paragraphs weren’t clear enough about this, here’s what follows one paragraph later:

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. DOE will not contend that it looked beyond the prime grantee(s) to consider the political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries of the grant funds.

DOE accepts that the differential treatment resulting in the October 2025 termination of Blue State grants and the non-termination of non-Blue State grants was not based on a rational connection between the recipient’s location and/or place of performance and DOE’s past or current agency priorities.

The administration red-painted itself into a corner. When litigation push came to shove, the DOE was forced to admit its grant program is nothing more than a slush fund for red states and an instrument of deprivation for blue states. Sickening. And it’s all there in black and white, delineating the haves and have-nots based on their voting preferences. No wonder the administration is demanding states turn over voter registration info. It’s not just about rigging elections and suppressing voters. It’s also about giving the administration the tools it needs to be vindictive on a granular level.

Filed Under: bigotry, department of energy, federal funding, maga, political lawfare, russ vought, trump administration, vindictiveness