A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration acted illegally when it canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants for projects exclusively in states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found the terminations violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, saying the administration offered no legitimate basis for targeting recipients based on their states’ electoral preferences. The decision was the second federal court ruling in a single day to halt the administration’s rollback of clean energy programs.
The ruling restores funding for hundreds of battery, hydrogen, and electrical-grid projects across 16 states and adds to a growing line of court orders blocking the administration from cutting programs based on the political alignment of grant recipients.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration illegally canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants for projects in 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, finding the terminations violated the Constitution’s equal protection requirements.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued the ruling after the city of St. Paul, Minn., and a coalition of environmental groups sued the Energy Department over the loss of their grants. The decision blocks the administration’s cancellation of hundreds of battery, hydrogen, and electrical-grid projects across those states.
“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 the 17-page opinion. The administration offered no explanation for how its targeting of grant recipients based on their states’ electoral preferences “rationally advances their stated government interest,” the judge added.
Energy Department spokesman Ben Dietderich said officials “stand by our review process, which evaluated these awards individually and determined they did not meet the standards necessary to justify the continued spending of taxpayer dollars.” He said: “The American people deserve a government that is accountable and responsible in managing taxpayer funds.”
White House budget director Russell Vought said on social media that “the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled.”
The administration canceled projects 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 of which supported Harris. The largest individual cuts include up to $1.2 billion for California’s hydrogen hub, aimed at accelerating hydrogen technology and production, and up to $1 billion for a hydrogen project in the Pacific Northwest.
Projects in states that supported Trump were not included in the terminations. A Texas hydrogen project and a three-state project covering West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania were spared, according to clean-energy supporters who obtained a list of the Energy Department targets.
The ruling came on the same day a separate federal judge ordered construction to resume on a major offshore wind farm serving Rhode Island and Connecticut — a second setback in hours for the administration’s clean energy rollbacks.
Trump signaled the approach last fall. In an Oct. 1 interview with One America News, a conservative outlet, he said: “I’m allowed to cut things that never should have been approved in the first place and I will probably do that.”
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, another group that lost funding, said the ruling would help keep clean energy affordable and create jobs. “Affordable energy should be a reality for everyone, and the restoration of these grants is an important step toward making that possible,” she said.