DOE admits OMB canceled 284 clean energy grants solely to punish political opponents

Last September, the Department of Energy (DOE) recommended cancellation of 624 grants for clean energy projects that had been approved by the Biden administration. After reviewing the list, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) winnowed it down to 284 grants—all but one of which had been awarded to projects in states represented by Democrats in the U.S. Senate and that had voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

"No decisions were made on politics," Energy Secretary Chris Wright improbably insisted during a House hearing on June 10. "I keep hearing that charge. It's bullshit."

While that might have been true of the DOE's original list, it was not true of the grant terminations that the OMB ultimately approved. A month after Wright's testimony, DOE Principal Deputy General Counsel Jeff Novak admitted that the OMB's decisions about which grants to cancel were "based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state," as opposed to "any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor."

Legal Context

That admission, which The New York Times highlighted on Friday, was part of the DOE's July 15 stipulations in Thakur v. Trump, a case brought by University of California researchers who are fighting to retain their federal grants.

In a June 4 lawsuit, the researchers argued that the Trump administration's "mass termination of grants"—presented as part of the cost-cutting steps taken by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency—illegally usurped congressional powers.

To avoid discovery in that case, the Energy Department agreed to a list of stipulations, focusing on the grants that the OMB decided to nix in October.

Political Targeting Confirmed

"Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled," OMB Director Russell Vought bragged in an October 1 post on X. Vought listed 16 affected states, all of which had awarded their electoral votes to Harris in 2024.

That was no mere coincidence, Novak confirms. The DOE's "624-grant list included proposals to terminate awards with a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in States that awarded their electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and [had] two Democratic-caucusing Senators," he writes, along with "awards with a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a State that awarded its electoral votes to President Trump in the 2024 election or [had] at least one Republican-caucusing Senator."

The OMB list of 284 targets, by contrast, omitted grants in the latter category.

"With one exception," Novak says, "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 [had] two Democratic-caucusing Senators." Those canceled grants included awards to two of the plaintiffs in Thakur v. Trump.

The remaining 340 grants on the DOE's list—all of which involved states that went for Trump in 2024 or had at least one Republican senator—"were not terminated in October 2025, and they have not since been terminated."

Contradiction with DOE's Own Approach

That distinction, Novak concedes, "was not based on a rational connection between the recipient's location and/or place of performance and DOE's past or current agency priorities." Nor was it consistent with the approach that the DOE had taken.

"The political identity of the grant recipient's state was not a factor that DOE's program offices considered in evaluating whether to retain, modify, or terminate grants," Novak says. "DOE's program offices had proposed to terminate similarly situated Blue State and non-Blue State grants."

Related Case

Last December in St. Paul v. Wright, another case involving the OMB's cancellation of DOE grants, the government's lawyers similarly conceded that "the selection of which DOE grant