Court rules Trump illegally blocked clean energy subsidies to Democratic states | Donald Trump News

A U.S. district judge ruled that Trump’s move targeted states that voted Democratic in the 2024 election.

A US judge has ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration acted illegally by canceling payments of $7.6 billion in clean energy subsidies to states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

In a ruling Monday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said the administration’s actions violated the Constitution’s equal protection requirements.

“Defendants freely admit that they made decisions to terminate the grant primarily – if not exclusively – based on whether the recipient resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024,” Mehta wrote in a summary of the case.

The grants were intended to support hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states, including California, Colorado, New Jersey and Washington. The projects included initiatives to create battery factories and hydrogen technology.

But plans in those states were canceled in October, as the Trump administration sought to increase pressure on Democratic-led states during an abrupt government shutdown.

At the time, Trump told One America News Network (OAN) that he would take on projects closely associated with the Democratic Party.

“We could remove the projects they wanted, their pet projects, and they would be deleted forever,” he told the outlet.

Russell Vought, the Trump-appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget, posted on social media that month that “funding intended to fuel the left’s climate agenda” had been “cancelled.”

The cuts included up to $1.2 billion for a hub in California aimed at accelerating hydrogen technology, and up to $1 billion for a hydrogen project in the Pacific Northwest.

St Paul, Minnesota, was among the jurisdictions affected by the subsidy cuts. The city and a coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s decision.

Second legal setback

A spokesperson for the US Department of Energy, however, said the Trump administration disagreed with the judge’s ruling.

Officials “stand by our review process, which evaluated these awards individually and determined that they did not meet the standards necessary to justify the continued spending of taxpayer dollars,” spokesman Ben Dietderich said.

The Trump administration has repeatedly pledged to cut what it considers wasteful government spending.

Monday’s ruling marks the second legal setback in just hours for Trump’s efforts to roll back clean energy programs in the United States.

Another federal judge ruled Monday that work on a major offshore wind farm for Rhode Island and Connecticut can resume, giving the industry at least a temporary victory as Trump seeks to shut it down.

The US president campaigned for the White House on a promise to end the offshore wind industry, saying electric wind turbines – sometimes called windmills – are too expensive and harm whales and birds.

Instead, Trump pushed the United States to increase its production of fossil fuels, considered the main contributor to climate change. The US president has repeatedly defied the scientific consensus on climate change and called it a “hoax”.