The Trump administration has spent nearly a year insisting it was cutting government waste.
In federal court, it finally supplied the missing definition: waste is apparently any project located where voters preferred Kamala Harris.
In a July 15 stipulation filed in Thakur v. Trump, the Department of Energy acknowledged that the Office of Management and Budget selected 284 grants for an October 2025 round of termination notices. With one exception, every grant was connected to a state that voted for Harris and had two senators who caucused with Democrats.
Meanwhile, approximately 340 other grants that Energy Department reviewers had also recommended terminating were left untouched. Every one of those grants was connected to a state Trump won or one represented by at least one Republican senator.
That is not an inference from a suspicious spreadsheet. The department stipulated to it.
DOE accepted that the grants were selected “solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.”
The department also accepted that the decisions were not based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-saving or performance-related factor, and that the political distinction had no rational connection to the agency’s priorities.
Last October, the department told the public something rather different.
Its official announcement claimed the cancellations followed a “thorough, individualized financial review.” It said the projects failed to advance the country’s energy needs, lacked economic viability or offered taxpayers a poor return.
Apparently, the individual reviews were thorough enough to locate each project on an electoral map.
The October announcement covered 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects, valued at approximately $7.56 billion. The cuts affected work involving battery manufacturing, hydrogen technology, electrical-grid improvements, energy efficiency and carbon capture.
There is no requirement that every federal grant continue forever. Agencies can review projects, identify failures and cancel awards that no longer serve the public.
But according to DOE’s own court filing, performance did not determine which projects landed in this termination tranche. Politics did.
And the punishment was not confined to governors, senators or Democratic Party offices. It reached workers, researchers, apprentices, utilities and local communities.
In Oregon, the termination list included a City of Portland project intended to install utility-pole-mounted electric-vehicle chargers, with an emphasis on renters and neighborhoods that lack convenient public charging.
It included Portland General Electric’s SmartGrid Advanced Load Management and Optimized Neighborhood project, which was developing energy-efficient technology for buildings. A second PGE award supported testing involving wind, solar and battery generation.
The list also included Oregon State University research and a Crater Lake Electrical apprenticeship initiative designed to help workers from disadvantaged communities train for jobs in the solar industry.
None of those projects cast a ballot.
At the time of the cancellations, White House budget director Russell Vought publicly celebrated the elimination of funding for the left’s climate agenda. Energy Secretary Chris Wright continued to describe the cancellations as business decisions based on project quality and taxpayer value.
The court filing has now reduced that explanation to debris.
The administration did not merely cancel clean-energy projects it opposed. It separated grants by the political identity of their states, terminated the blue-state projects and spared similarly situated projects connected to Republican states.
Federal taxpayers do not submit their money in red and blue envelopes. Congress does not appropriate one budget for loyal states and another for places that failed the presidential personality test.
The Energy Department said it was rooting out waste.
What it actually rooted out was federal funding in states that voted incorrectly.