Trump administration concedes that it canceled research grants in blue states

The Trump administration admitted that it terminated nearly 300 federal research grants “solely because” the projects were connected to states that voted against Donald Trump in 2024 and had two Democratic senators in office, according to court filings.

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The administration made the admission in a court filing this month responding to a lawsuit brought by University of California researchers challenging the cancellation.

In the filing, the administration wrote as an undisputed statement of fact that on a list of more than 2,300 financial assistance awards across the Energy Department, 624 grants on these lists were designated either “termination” or “cancel.”

Of those 624 grants, Jeff Novak, the principal deputy general counsel of the Energy Department, wrote that in October the Office of Management and Budget identified 284 specific grants that were marked to be terminated.

Novak wrote that with one exception, “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 has two Democratic-caucusing Senators.”

Novak added that the remaining 340 grants proposed for termination were ultimately not canceled in October 2025 nor since then.

“All such grants had 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 has at least one Republican-caucusing Senator,” Novak wrote of the unterminated grants.

Novak wrote that the decision to cancel the grants listed in the October notice tranche — those 284 — was not “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”

“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State,” Novak wrote.

He added that the Energy Department “will not contend that it looked beyond the prime grantee(s) to consider the political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries of the grant funds.”

The New York Times first reported this filing.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Energy Department argued in a statement Friday that court filings did not show that termination decisions were made on a political basis.

“That is a misrepresentation of the court filing and of Mr. Novak’s words,” Ben Dietderich, press secretary for the Energy Department, said in a statement. “None of the termination decisions were based on political considerations. Secretary Wright has explained this numerous times in briefings on Capitol Hill.”

In an appearance before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in June, Energy Secretary Chris Wright denied that decisions made around grant cancellations were partisan.

“No decisions were made on politics. I keep hearing that charge. It’s bulls---t. We’re going to say it a million times,” Wright said.

In a social media post in October, when the 284 grants were canceled, OMB Director Russ Vought wrote, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”

Vought listed 16 states where projects were canceled, including California, New York, Colorado, Vermont and New Jersey, among others.

The filing comes as the Office of Management and Budget proposed a new rule that would allow political appointees to gain unprecedented control over the $1 trillion per year that is provided by federal grants.

The office argues that the rule is meant to ensure that grants align with the sitting president’s priorities and to improve oversight. The rule proposes that political appointees screen grant applications to ensure they do not “promote anti-American values,” and they could terminate grants they saw as “no longer in the Federal Government’s interest.”

The 284 federal grants canceled by the Energy Department are just one segment of funding that has been targeted by the Trump administration.

Since Trump began his second term, the administration has canceled grants for including mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion and frozen research funding at universities like Harvard based on allegations of antisemitism.

Trump has also threatened to pull funding from states that do not conform to his policies. In January, he said he would deny federal funding to states that resisted his anti-immigration agenda and had so-called sanctuary cities.