The Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment when canceling billions of dollars in environmental grants for projects in “blue states” that didn’t vote for him in the last election, a judge ruled Monday.
Trump’s blatant discrimination came on the same day as the government shut down last fall. In total, 315 grants were terminated in October, ending support for 223 projects worth approximately $7.5 billion, the Department of Energy confirmed. All the awardees, except for one, were based in states where Donald Trump lost the majority vote to Kamala Harris in 2024.
Only seven awardees sued, defending projects that helped states with “electric vehicle development, updating building energy codes, and addressing methane emissions.” They accused Trump officials of clearly discriminating against Democratic voters by pointing to their social media posts boasting about punishing blue states.
On X, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, bragged that nearly “$8 billion in Green NewScam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” then listed only states that did not vote for Trump. Meanwhile on Truth Social, Trump confirmed he met with Vought to “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut” during the shutdown.
On Monday, US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion that the case was “unique” because ordinarily “the mere presence of political considerations in an agency action” does not mean that officials have run “afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.”
But in this case, Trump “freely” admitted that he 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.” And that classification had “no rational relationship” to the government’s supposed interest in cutting off funding, Mehta found, which was that projects were not “economically viable” or didn’t advance the administration’s energy goals.
In fact, Mehta noted that similar projects in red states continued to receive funding.
“There is no reason to believe that terminating an award to a recipient located in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Democratic candidates—and, particularly, voted against President Trump—furthers the agency’s energy priorities any more than terminating a similar grant of a recipient in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Republican candidates or voted for President Trump,” Mehta said.
Trump officials offered “no explanation for how their purposeful segregation of grantees based on their electoral support for President Trump rationally advances their stated government interest,” Mehta said. Instead, “defendants concede that the political identity of a terminated grantee’s state, including the fact that the state supported Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, played a preponderant role in the October 2025 grant termination decisions.”
It wasn’t a total win for plaintiffs, who did not prevail on First Amendment claims, and there are many hundreds of awardees whose grant terminations were so far not impacted by the narrow ruling.
Deciding that the government had violated grantees’ rights to equal protection, Mehta only ordered a return to the status quo, reinstating seven grants totaling $27.6 million.
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