LAGOS, Nigeria. (Voice Of Naija) The Trump administration has admitted in federal court that it deliberately cancelled more than $7.5 billion in clean energy grants targeting states that voted against President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election — a stunning concession that confirms what Democratic governors had alleged for months and that legal experts say represents one of the most brazen abuses of executive power in modern American history.
According to NBC News, the admission came in court documents filed this month in response to a lawsuit brought by University of California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding across multiple federal agencies. In the filing, a senior Department of Energy official named Novak confirmed that 284 grants were terminated “solely because” the projects were located in states that awarded their electoral votes to Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and had two Democratic-caucusing senators in office.
The filing further confirmed that hundreds of additional energy grants in Republican-leaning states which the Department of Energy had itself recommended for cancellation were left entirely untouched. In other words, scientific and technical merit played no role in the decision. Political loyalty did.
The New York Times, which first reported on the court documents, said the cancellations halted funding for hundreds of energy projects across 16 Democratic-leaning states identified in government records as California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington.
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Among the projects defunded were electrical grid upgrades in California and Oregon, efforts to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado, and large hubs designed to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel across the Pacific Northwest, GV Wire reported. These are not fringe initiatives they are the kind of infrastructure investments that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was specifically designed to fund, and which the Department of Energy had approved through its standard merit-based review process.
In contrast, grants in states that backed Trump were preserved, even where the Department of Energy’s own analysis had flagged them for potential cancellation. The court filing confirmed this discrepancy as an undisputed statement of fact meaning the Trump administration itself does not dispute it.
The political nature of the cancellations was not initially what the Trump administration claimed. When the grants were terminated in October 2025, White House Budget Director Russell Vought publicly described the move as a corrective against wasteful Biden-era spending. Vought called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” according to the MSNBC Rachel Maddow Show. Officials in affected states accused the White House at the time of what California Governor Gavin Newsom described as “mafioso tactics” — brazenly weaponising federal grant-making in ways that had historically been insulated from partisan politics.
Team Trump was initially dismissive of those accusations, MSNBC reported. The court admission this month confirmed that the accusers were right.
Federal officials offered the new details as part of an agreement with the plaintiffs designed to spare the government a full discovery process the exhaustive, evidence-uncovering legal procedure in which agencies would have been required to hand over potentially far more damaging internal records, the New York Times noted.
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The court admission did not emerge in a vacuum. In January 2026, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had violated the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution when it cancelled the grants exclusively in Democratic states, according to Ars Technica.
The Fifth Amendment guarantees equal protection and prohibits the government from depriving persons of property — including legally awarded grants — without due process of law.
The New Republic reported that despite the ruling, Trump is not expected to end the practice. The administration has also been accused of withholding FEMA disaster aid and childcare funding from states that did not support the president politically.
The implications of the admission extend beyond the United States. The episode is a case study in what happens when the executive branch of a democracy treats federal resources funded by taxpayers of all political persuasions as a reward for political loyalty rather than a tool of governance. Legal scholars who spoke to the New York Times described the admission as rare in its candour and serious in its constitutional implications, noting that the explicit acknowledgement of politically-motivated funding decisions gives courts a clear basis for further rulings against the administration.
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For Nigeria, the story resonates in a deeply familiar way. The politicisation of federal allocations withholding funds from states governed by opposition parties, or ensuring that infrastructure projects land disproportionately in friendly constituencies is a pattern that has marked Nigerian governance across multiple administrations. The difference is that in the United States, a court has now extracted a formal admission of that practice and ruled it unconstitutional.
It is a reminder that democratic accountability mechanisms independent courts, free press, civil society litigation are the only reliable check on the abuse of state resources, regardless of how powerful the government wielding them may be.
