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 supported Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024, according to a court opinion reported by the Associated Press.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said the terminations violated the Constitution’s equal protection requirements. In a 17-page opinion, Mehta wrote that the administration’s grant-termination decisions were made primarily, if not exclusively, based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024.

Mehta also said the administration offered no explanation for how the purposeful targeting of grant recipients based on their electoral support for Trump, or lack of it, rationally advanced the government’s stated interest. The opinion described the administration as acting unlawfully in connection with those decisions.

The canceled grants supported hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states, the AP reported. The projects included 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. A White House budget director, Russell Vought, posted on social media that “the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” the AP reported.

The decision came as another court order also limited the administration’s clean-energy rollback efforts. The AP said a separate federal judge ruled Monday that work on a major offshore wind farm for Rhode Island and Connecticut could resume, handing the industry at least a temporary victory.

A Department of Energy spokesman said officials disagreed with the ruling on the clean energy grants. Ben Dietderich said officials stood by their review process, saying it evaluated these awards individually and determined they did not meet standards necessary to justify continued spending of taxpayer dollars, and added: “The American people deserve a government that is accountable and responsible in managing taxpayer funds.”

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, the AP reported. The AP said all 16 targeted states supported Harris.

The AP reported that supporters said the cuts included 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. It also reported that supporters said a Texas hydrogen project and a three-state project in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania were spared, based on a list of the DOE targets they obtained.

The lawsuit was filed by the city of St. Paul and a coalition of environmental groups after they lost grants. Trump, in an interview last fall with One America News, said his administration could cut projects that Democrats want and that “I’m allowed to cut things that never should have been approved in the first place and I will probably do that,” according to the AP.

Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, 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 equal protection, the AP reported. Anne Evens, CEO of Elevate Energy, said the ruling would help keep clean energy affordable and create jobs, and said: “Affordable energy should be a reality for everyone, and the restoration of these grants is an important step toward making that possible,” according to the AP.

@type: NewsArticle license: “https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/” isBasedOn: