The Department of Energy acknowledged in a federal court filing this week that it terminated $8 billion in clean energy grants based on a single criterion: whether the recipient state voted for Captain Comb-Over in the 2024 election. The admission was buried in a little-noticed legal brief responding to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of blue states.
The filing states plainly that projects located in states carried by the former president were allowed to proceed. Projects in states that voted for his opponent were canceled. The rationale, department lawyers explained, was a matter of executive discretion.
“The agency’s grant management aligns federal expenditures with the policy priorities of the administration,” wrote lead counsel Margaret Dwyer. “State-level voting patterns provided a rational proxy for determining whether a given project advanced those priorities.” Dwyer added that the review process identified more than $7.5 billion in grants that did not meet the new alignment standard.
The documents show that agency staff used a spreadsheet matching grant recipients against 2024 presidential vote totals. Eleven of the twelve states that lost all funding voted for the Democratic candidate. The remaining canceled funds went to a single congressional district in Nebraska that split from its state’s overall result.
Officials had previously described the cancellations as urgent cost-saving measures targeting waste. The October announcement cited a need to protect taxpayers. The new filing makes no mention of waste. It notes only that the department successfully reassigned 130 grants away from jurisdictions whose electoral behavior failed a political loyalty check.
The legal brief further argues that Article II of the Constitution grants the executive branch authority to direct spending in a manner consistent with the president’s vision. “A government-wide review determined that withholding funds from non-supportive states was fully compliant with the Take Care Clause,” it reads. The brief does not address a subsection of that clause requiring faithful execution of all laws.
A spokesperson for the Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment. An internal memo obtained separately confirms that the agency is assessing whether the same voting-record criterion should apply to the distribution of federal highway funds and school lunch reimbursements.
