The admission arrived the ordinary way admissions do, buried in a filing. Responding to a lawsuit brought by University of California researchers, a Department of Energy attorney 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' [1].
The same filing states that the terminations were not based on 'any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor,' but 'based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state' [1]. That is the government describing its own conduct, in its own words, to a court.
The grants are part of roughly $7.5 billion in clean-energy funding cut in October, across 16 states named by the Office of Management and Budget director, Russ Vought: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington [1]. Every one is a state the filing's own criterion would select.
The department has since said the filing did not change its assessment that the decisions were not political [1]. That is a hard position to hold against the sentence its own lawyer wrote.
Grant terminations are supposed to turn on whether the work is being done and whether the money is being spent as the statute directs. This filing says the criterion was the electoral map - and that it was the only one [1].
