DOE court filing says 284 green grant cuts were based solely on politics

A Department of Energy court filing says 284 green energy grants in an October cancellation tranche were chosen based solely on the political identity of the recipient states, contradicting repeated assertions by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other officials that the projects were cut because they did not meet U.S. energy needs or were not economically viable. DOE lawyer Jeff Novak wrote that the department first assembled a list of 624 grants for possible termination, and the White House Office of Management and Budget selected 284 of them. All but one were tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and had two Democratic-caucusing senators, while the other 340 grants on DOE’s broader list were not canceled. The Energy Department later announced that 321 funding awards across 223 projects were terminated, affecting battery plants, hydrogen technology, grid upgrades and carbon capture efforts across 16 Harris-supporting states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state. The latest filing in Thakur v. Trump follows an earlier court acknowledgment that grant selection was influenced by whether recipients were in so-called blue states, and federal lawyers also said officials used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 to screen projects against Trump administration priorities. Democrats and environmental groups said the filing showed the federal government had been weaponized against politically disfavored states, while the Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The department’s internal watchdog opened an investigation in December after Democratic lawmakers sought a formal probe.