The Trump administration has acknowledged that hundreds of federal energy grants canceled last year were singled out because they were located in Democratic-leaning states — not because the projects were failing, too expensive or performing poorly.
According to a new federal court filing, 283 of the 284 Department of Energy grants selected for a major round of cancellations in October 2025 were tied to states that backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and had two senators who caucused with Democrats.
Even more striking, the Department of Energy acknowledged that the grants were selected “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.”
The admission is now fueling fresh scrutiny over whether the Trump administration used billions of dollars in federal funding as political leverage against states that voted against the president.
The controversy dates back to May 2025, when Energy Secretary Chris Wright established what the department called a Portfolio Review Process.
Under that system, DOE offices were instructed to examine financial assistance awards and recommend whether grants should be kept, modified or terminated.
By September, the department had sent the Office of Management and Budget lists covering thousands of awards that had undergone review.
Among them were 624 grants that DOE offices had recommended for either “termination” or “cancel.”
But the grants ultimately chosen for the administration’s October cancellation round followed a remarkably different pattern.
OMB selected 284 grants for termination notices.
Of those 284, all but one were connected to states that had awarded their electoral votes to Harris in 2024 and were represented by two Democratic-caucusing senators.
The court filing refers to those projects as “Blue State” grants.
That meant 283 of the 284 grants selected for cancellation fell into the administration’s Blue State category.
At the same time, roughly 340 other grants that DOE offices had also recommended for termination were left untouched during the October round.
Those grants were connected to states that either supported Trump in the 2024 election or had at least one Republican-caucusing senator.
And according to the filing, those grants had still not been terminated when the stipulated facts were submitted to the court.
The political divide becomes even more significant because DOE acknowledged that the October cancellations were not based on problems with the programs themselves.
The department agreed that neither the grants selected for the October termination round nor the ARCHES grant involved in the lawsuit were chosen because of “any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”
Instead, according to the stipulation, the distinction was political.
DOE acknowledged the grants were included “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — specifically whether the project or recipient was located in what the administration classified as a Blue State or a non-Blue State.
The department also acknowledged that treating the two groups differently was not rationally connected to DOE’s previous or current policy priorities.
Perhaps most notably, political affiliation was not even part of the department’s original grant-review process.
DOE program offices reviewing the grants had not been instructed to consider whether a project was located in a Democratic or Republican state.
Those offices had initially recommended terminating grants in both Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning states.
The sharply partisan divide appeared later, when OMB selected the grants that would actually receive termination notices.
The disclosures surfaced in Neeta Thakur et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al., a federal lawsuit filed in California involving University of California researchers and other recipients of Department of Energy funding.
The stipulated facts could become politically explosive for the White House because they appear to undercut any argument that the October grant cancellations were simply the result of ordinary budget-cutting or concerns about government waste.
Instead, the government’s own filing says hundreds of projects were treated differently depending on the political makeup of the states where they were located — leaving Trump’s critics with fresh ammunition to accuse the administration of using federal funding to punish Democratic territory.
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