'Corrupt abuse': Nancy Pelosi questions Trump administration's termination of grants in Blue states

Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed the Trump administration in a post on X after a New York Times report revealed that it had cut billions in grants for energy projects in states that did not vote for President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Federal officials acknowledged the same in a court document. "Punishing Americans for their political views is a cruel and corrupt abuse of the public's trust," Pelosi wrote.

As per the document associated with a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the Department of Energy (DOE) created a list in the fall of last year, which contained recommendations to cancel more than 600 grants awarded by the Biden administration to various states, both Democrat and Republican, for energy projects. In October, the White House budget office, led by Russell T. Vought, cancelled 284 such grants, claiming that the measure would save the government nearly $8 billion in federal funding.

However, a lawyer from the DOE acknowledged that the termination of the grants was only based on the political standing of the state concerned. "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," read paragraph 9 of Section II of the listing.

Furthermore, the very next paragraph states that the department acknowledged the "differential treatment resulting in the October 2025 termination of Blue State grants and the non-termination of non-Blue State grants was not based on a rational connection between the recipient's location and/or place of performance and DOE's past or current agency priorities." In Red states, the government did not interfere with hundreds of such grants, despite the DOE's recommendation to consider terminating them.

The court documents appear to undermine Energy Secretary Chris Wright's congressional testimony in June, where he said none of the decisions to cancel the energy grants were politically motivated. Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, however, clarified that it was not the case, as the department did not send the recommendations to the government with political considerations in mind. "There is no contradiction, and any suggestion of a contradiction is a misrepresentation of the court filing," he said.

The Trump administration's decision to terminate energy grants to Blue states resulted in a cessation of funds that would have been used for crucial projects like upgrading electrical grids in states like California and Oregon, curbing methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado, and enabling large hubs to produce hydrogen fuel, which burns clean, in California and the Pacific Northwest.

The grant terminations have drawn severe criticism from Democrats. Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Marcy Kaptur called the cuts "outright un-American" in a joint statement. "This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: It terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election," the statement read. "This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views."