Trump Is Waging War on Americans in Blue States — and His Administration Just Admitted It in Court

In a striking admission, lawyers for the Trump administration have now formally acknowledged, under oath in court filings, to pulling federal investments from states based solely on how they voted in the 2024 election — a move opponents say has all the hallmarks of a punitive act, one undertaken using taxpayers’ own money. This according to recent filings by the Department of Energy as part of early negotiations in a federal lawsuit brought by University of California researchers.

“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 filings read.

The Department of Energy had recommended a list of 624 grants for possible termination; the White House Office of Management and Budget then winnowed that list down to 284 — all but one located in the 16 blue states that voted against Donald Trump. The 340 grants left untouched belonged to states that cast their electoral votes for Trump or had at least one Republican senator.

The cuts were among a tranche of cancellations, announced in October, aimed at rolling back nearly $8 billion in funding for Biden-era alternative energy projects such as wind and solar — the very sort of cheap, homegrown power that foreign adversaries can’t blockade or embargo. The value of that kind of investment is playing out in real time abroad. In Pakistan, a consumer-led rooftop-solar boom has grown from almost nothing to nearly a fifth of the nation’s electricity. That shift has let the country avoid more than $12 billion in oil and gas imports and blunt a crisis it is otherwise acutely exposed to — Pakistan is among the nations most dependent on oil and gas moving through the Strait of Hormuz, the route choked off by the President’s war with Iran. In Spain, where wind and solar now supply 42% of the grid, households have been shielded from a roughly 60% spike in gas prices that the war triggered — their electricity bills barely moved, and actually dipped in April.

This is the very resilience those Biden-era projects were meant to build here. Few would have been finished in time to cushion these states from the current shock, but that isn’t the point. They were cancelled not because they wouldn’t have worked, but because of who they would have helped.

“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.”

Yet the DOE insisted at the time that the cuts would “protect taxpayer dollars and expand America’s supply of affordable, reliable, and secure energy.” For whom, exactly? On the evidence, affordable energy is a reward for the President’s supporters — and letting it reach his opponents is the thing to be guarded against.

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The Trump Narrative

Each of the 16 states affected by these cuts 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 energy needs and “were not economically viable.” Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, previously testified to Congress that the decision to terminate the grants was not political:

“So let me restate again: all of the 2,270 projects we evaluated were not evaluated in any way, shape or form based on where they were. … 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,” he told the House Appropriations Committee in April of 2026.

And then, going further, he called the accusation that the decisions were political “bull-s***,” reiterating that “no decisions were made on politics” in his June 10th testimony before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Russell Vought, the White House budget director who oversaw the terminations, insisted that he was simply paring back Biden-era federal grants the White House considered wasteful — part of what he branded a “Green New Scam.”

Those claims are directly contradicted by the recent Department of Energy filings, which concede that the cuts were not based on “any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”

Here too, benefits to blue states are branded wasteful — a “scam” — while identical projects roll on in red states, funded from the same taxpayer pool.

This Was Never Just About Energy

While the admission was startlingly candid, it builds on prior claims by the administration that leveraging federal budget disbursements to reward political allies or punish opposition states is “constitutionally permissible.”

In December, it argued this exact point. Two months after officials in blue states accused the White House of “mafioso tactics,” administration lawyers defended precisely this sort of political targeting in court, claiming that “consideration of partisan politics is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”