The Trump administration has acknowledged in court documents that it revoked $7.6 billion in grants across hundreds of clean energy projects, doing so, in its own words, "based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state." The 16 affected states all voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

The admission directly contradicts prior statements from Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other officials, who repeatedly maintained that the terminated projects failed to adequately serve the nation's energy needs or posed other problems rendering them poor uses of taxpayer funds. Federal courts have generally required executive agencies to distribute congressionally appropriated funds according to statutory eligibility criteria rather than political considerations.

Democrats and environmental organizations quickly seized on the court filing, released Friday, accusing the administration of "weaponizing" the federal apparatus to eliminate jobs and penalize communities over their political preferences.

"This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: it terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election," said Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, both senior Democrats on the House and Senate Appropriations committees, respectively.

"Weaponizing the federal government like this is outright un-American, and it's hardworking families already struggling with sky-high costs who are suffering the consequences of this corrupt abuse of power," Kaptur and Murray continued. They urged congressional Republicans to help hold the administration "accountable for the President's failure to look out for all Americans."

The Energy Department announced last October the termination of 321 funding awards spanning 223 projects, asserting that upon review they "did not adequately advance the nation's energy needs or were not economically viable." The decision formed part of President Donald Trump's broader push against climate programs and clean energy funding, eliminating federal backing for battery plant construction, hydrogen technology development, electric grid upgrades, and carbon dioxide capture initiatives — technology areas that have received congressional funding through bipartisan legislation, including the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

White House budget director Russell Vought spotlighted the reductions in a social media post, declaring that money "to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled." The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The canceled projects were concentrated in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state — all jurisdictions that backed Harris. Wright had previously characterized the cancellations as "business decisions" grounded in whether the projects represented sound taxpayer investments.

Legal challenges followed immediately. More than two dozen Democratic members of Congress, led by California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla alongside Rep. Zoe Lofgren, sent a letter to the Energy Department's acting inspector general seeking a formal probe. The department's internal watchdog opened an investigation in December, the findings of which could bear on both the ongoing litigation and congressional oversight.

Government lawyers had already confirmed in a late-2024 court filing that grant selection "was influenced by whether a grantee's address was located in a State that tends to elect … Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called 'Blue States')." That disclosure emerged in a separate lawsuit brought by clean energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota.

The most recent admission surfaced in Thakur v. Trump, a case ongoing since last spring. Federal lawyers conceded that keywords tied to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy, and COVID-19 were used to flag projects conflicting with Trump administration priorities.

Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, said the filing reveals "the Trump administration is brazenly admitting to a vindictive approach to cancelling much-needed energy infrastructure that ignores the job losses, air pollution and increasing bills that people are experiencing everywhere." Rather than "building the energy projects we desperately need," she argued, billions in taxpayer dollars are "going to line the pockets of a small handful of fossil fuel company CEOs," pointing to nearly $3 billion the administration pledged to scrap offshore wind projects in favor of fossil fuel ventures such as natural gas and coal.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.