Court says Trump admin illegally blocked billions in clean energy grants to Democratic states

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration acted illegally when it canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants for projects in states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

The grants supported hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states, including battery plants, hydrogen technology projects, upgrades to the electric grid and efforts to capture carbon dioxide emissions.

The Energy Department said the projects were terminated after a review determined they did not adequately advance the nation's energy needs or were not economically viable. Russell Vought, the White House budget director, said on social media that ''the Left's climate agenda is being canceled.''

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said the administration's action violated the Constitution's equal protection requirements.

''Defendants freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily — if not exclusively — based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024," Mehta wrote in a 17-page opinion. The administration offered no explanation for how their purposeful targeting of grant recipients based on their electoral support for Trump — or lack of it — "rationally advances their stated government interest,'' the judge added.

The ruling was the second legal setback for the administration's rollback of clean energy program in a matter of hours. A separate federal judge ruled Monday that work on a major offshore wind farm for Rhode Island and Connecticut can resume, handing the industry at least a temporary victory as Trump seeks to shut it down.

A spokesman for the Energy Department said officials disagree with the judge's decision on clean energy grants.

Projects were canceled in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state. All 16 targeted states supported Harris.

The cuts include up to $1.2 billion for California's hydrogen hub that is aimed at accelerating hydrogen technology and production, and up to $1 billion for a hydrogen project in the Pacific Northwest. A Texas hydrogen project and a three-state project in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania were spared, according to clean-energy supporters who obtained a list of the DOE targets.

The city of St. Paul and a coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit after they lost grants.

Trump said in an interview last fall with One America News, a conservative outlet, that his administration could cut projects that Democrats want. ''I'm allowed to cut things that never should have been approved in the first place and I will probably do that,'' Trump said in the Oct. 1 interview.

Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the groups that filed the suit, said the court ruling ''recognized that the Trump Department of Energy vindictively canceled projects for clean affordable energy that just happened to be in states disfavored by the Trump administration, in violation of the bedrock Constitutional guarantee that all people in all states have equal protection under the law.''

Anne Evens, CEO of Elevate Energy, one of the groups that lost funding, said the court ruling would help keep clean energy affordable and create jobs.