The Trump administration admitted in a federal court filing in July 2026 that it canceled more than $7.5 billion in clean energy grants based solely on whether recipient states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. The New York Times first reported the admission on July 24, 2026, with The Guardian confirming the filing's contents the same day.

The case was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in June 2025 by six University of California faculty members and other researchers. They were challenging the government's decision to cancel grant funding, money awarded during the Biden administration for clean energy projects, that had been promised to their institutions.

The Department of Energy said in the filing that it grouped certain grants into what it called the "October notice tranche" and that the decision to include them was based solely on whether the recipient's state was a "Blue State or a non-Blue State." Blue states tend to vote Democratic; red states tend to vote Republican. The department also acknowledged that it did not evaluate any of these grants based on how well the projects were performing, whether they followed the law, or whether they were saving money. The ARCHES grant, a major federal investment in hydrogen energy, was one of the specific cancellations mentioned.

The Department of Energy terminated the grants in October 2025. Secretary Chris Wright first announced 24 cancellations in May 2025, saying it would save taxpayers over $3.7 billion. By September 30, 2025, the department said it had terminated 321 awards supporting 223 projects, with total stated savings of about $7.56 billion. The DOE said the cancellations were about protecting taxpayers from waste.

A Department of Energy spokesperson pushed back on how the court filing was described on July 24, 2026, saying the acknowledgment was about the timing of the announcement, not the decision to cancel the grants. But the filing's own language says the department "would not contend that it looked beyond the prime grantees to consider political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries." That means the department did not look past the main recipient to see whether the people who actually benefit from the projects lived in places with different political leanings.

This admission is part of a larger pattern. The administration has been working to dismantle clean energy funding that was created under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a 2021 law that invested hundreds of billions of dollars in roads, bridges, internet access, and clean energy. In May 2025, the White House published a fact sheet titled "Ending the Green New Scam" saying the budget cancels over $15 billion in clean energy funds from that law. Another fact sheet, "Cuts to Woke Programs," published the same month, said the budget eliminates green energy initiatives. In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to end subsidies for "unreliable 'green' energy sources like wind and solar," according to a White House fact sheet.

On May 29, 2026, the administration published a proposed 400-page rule in the Federal Register, the official public journal where the government publishes new regulations. The rule would require grants to "demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities." If this rule becomes final, it would turn what is currently a disputed action into standard government practice, making it harder to challenge in court.

The broader context here matters for several reasons. The admission removes the main reason the DOE had given the public for canceling the grants, which was that the department was being a responsible steward of taxpayer money and evaluating projects on their merits. The court filing concedes the actual criterion was how the recipient state voted. The spokesperson's attempt to separate the "timing of the announcement" from the "termination decisions" does not hold up well against the filing's own words. And the proposed rule would take something that is now a contested executive action and bake it into the formal regulatory system, making future legal challenges harder by creating an official paper trail that frames political alignment as a standard criterion.

For anyone who works with federal grants, energy policy, or government law, the filing establishes a key fact: the department has acknowledged, under oath, that the only basis for canceling these grants was whether the recipient state voted for Trump. How the court in California weighs that admission, and whether the proposed rule survives the public feedback process it must go through before becoming final, will shape whether the government can be held to its grant promises in the future.

The case remains pending.