Federal Judge Rules Trump’s Energy Project Cuts Are Unlawful

The Trump administration’s decision to rescind about $8 billion in energy grant funding to recipients based in Democratic-leaning states is unlawful, a federal judge ruled Monday.

“The terminated grants had one glaring commonality: all the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Trump in the 2024 election,” U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta wrote in his opinion, adding that the administration’s funding cancellation violated equal protection rights.

The Energy Department’s decision — announced by Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought on the first day of the government shutdown in October — targeted grantees based in blue states. Red-state-based groups and companies using federal funding for similar projects, from grid connection infrastructure to hydrogen hubs, largely did not see the same grant terminations.

The city of St. Paul, Minnesota, and several environmental groups that sued the Department of Energy over seven of the grant terminations — which included funding for solar energy projects, electric vehicle charging and methane emissions reduction — argued in court filings that Vought’s announcement was rooted in political discrimination.

Mehta ruled that the Energy Department must walk back its decision to rescind the seven awards mentioned in the case.

The ruling does not make mention of the other grants canceled by the department in the same announcement, which span more than 200 projects. An internal Energy Department watchdog announced last month that it will audit all the cancellations.

The Energy Department argued in earlier filings in the case that while it primarily terminated awards for grantees based in blue states, its decision to terminate some awards and not others was actually made to further the Trump administration’s energy priorities.

But Mehta disagreed with that characterization in his opinion, arguing that the Trump administration made “no plausible rational connection” between advancing its energy priorities and canceling blue-state-based grants.

“There is no reason to believe that terminating an award to a recipient located in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Democratic candidates—and, particularly, voted against President Trump—furthers the agency’s energy priorities any more than terminating a similar grant of a recipient in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Republican candidates or voted for President Trump,” the opinion said.

The federal judge added that the Energy Department’s decision was based on “disparate treatment” of blue versus red states.

Previous reporting by NOTUS found that the grants terminated for blue-state-based groups could also have downstream effects in red states.

Mehta left the door open in his ruling to other politically-motivated agency decisions.

“By no means does the court conclude that the mere presence of political considerations in an agency action runs afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection,” the opinion said.