On July 15, Jeff Novak, an attorney for the Department of Energy, handed the court a number that doesn't need any explanation. Out of 284 canceled federal grant awards, 283 were in states that gave their electoral votes to Kamala Harris in 2024 and were represented by 2 Democratic senators. Novak went on to write that the department had identified 624 grants for possible cancellation, the White House Office of Management and Budget picked 284 of them, and the other 340 were left untouched. Nobody looked at the projects themselves, the law, the cost, or whether they were actually performing.
We're talking about $7.5 billion in clean energy funding, canceled in October after being approved under the previous administration. The details are coming out in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the loss of their grants. The timing wasn't random. The cuts happened while the White House was pressuring Democratic lawmakers during a budget showdown that shut down parts of the federal government. Publicly, the administration talked about saving taxpayer money. The director of the Office of Management and Budget, who also helped design the blueprint for rebuilding the federal government from the ground up, called the funding a green scam that fueled the left's climate agenda. He even listed the 16 states that got hit: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Not a single one had voted for Trump.
The Secretary of Energy testified before the House Science Committee just a month ago and swore under oath that politics had nothing to do with the review process. When lawmakers accused the department of making political decisions, he dismissed the claim with a profanity that's right there in the official transcript. Now his own lawyers have admitted that politics was the only thing that mattered. More than 300 years ago, a French moralist wrote that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. In this case, that tribute lasted only a few weeks before it disappeared, leaving the secretary as the man who denied under oath what his own attorneys later admitted in court.
The excerpts shown here are from a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Right in the introduction, the court notes that the mass cancellation of more than $7 billion in federal grant funding primarily affected projects in so-called "Blue States" and points to evidence suggesting it was done intentionally. On the final page, the court grants the plaintiffs permission to file their amended complaint but denies their request for a preliminary injunction at this stage. The underlying allegations themselves have not yet been finally decided.
Novak leaves no room for interpretation. The department accepts that the October cancellations were based solely on the political affiliation of the recipient state, whether it was blue or not. That's not the language of someone trying to cut spending. That's the language of someone dividing the country into friends and enemies. Comparable grants in Republican states that voted for Trump stayed in place, even though the department itself had recommended canceling them. The recommendation existed, but the money kept flowing anyway. What decided who got spared and who got cut wasn't the project. It was the color of the state on the electoral map.
There's a reason the administration is admitting all of this now, and that's what completes the picture. They're admitting it to avoid discovery. Investigative reporting had already uncovered much of what was happening. If the case moved forward, the government would have been forced to turn over internal documents, and apparently nobody in Washington wanted a judge reading through those files. They confessed to the smaller offense so the files containing the bigger one could stay sealed. It's a calculated admission, not an act of remorse, and it says more about the documents they're trying to keep hidden than the ones they've already revealed.
It doesn't stop with energy. Disaster relief from FEMA and childcare funding were also withheld from states that didn't vote for the president. The excuse changes from case to case, but the target always follows the same electoral map. When a hurricane slams into one of those states or a childcare budget runs dry, it's ordinary people who pay the price, people who often had nothing to do with the election result. Federal aid becomes a bargaining chip in the hands of the very person who's supposed to administer it fairly.
How the judge rules is still unknown, and the decision probably won't change much. A president who turned the federal budget into a weapon against his political opponents isn't going to stop because he suddenly found his conscience. He'll stop only if a court forces him to and has the power to return that money where it belongs - to the citizens, no matter who their state voted for. Until then, every administration that follows will have to live with the equation Novak laid bare in a single sentence: 283 to 1, and the one exception wasn't the rule - it was the mistake.
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