Trump Team Admits He’s Been Defunding States That Didn’t Vote for Him

The White House has admitted in court that it deliberately canceled federal grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump.

In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.

At the time, the White House said it was slashing the grants, passed during the Biden administration, to prevent tax dollars from being wasted. Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 architect Russ Vought called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” and singled out projects in 16 blue states: “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”

Only one month ago, Energy Secretary Chris Wright angrily insisted to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the cuts “did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process,” calling any accusation that the funding cancellations targeted certain states for political reasons “bullshit.”

But last week, a Department of Energy lawyer conceded the obvious.

“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 attorney wrote in a court filing, confessing that the grants were not terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

Similar green energy grants in Republican-led states that voted for Trump in 2024 were left untouched, despite the Department of Energy recommending their cancellation, the government said in the filing. The Trump administration is coming clean now, it said, because it wanted to avoid the government having to participate in the discovery process for the lawsuit.

That process could lead to the government having to hand over much more damaging internal documents to the lawyers representing the researchers. It’s not just about clean energy grants. The Trump administration has also held up other federal funding for states that didn’t support the president, such as FEMA disaster aid and childcare funding. While the court’s decision on this lawsuit is still pending, no matter how the judge rules, Trump is not likely to end his belligerent attempts to use federal funding as punishment. ...