US federal court deems Trump’s clean energy grant cancellation illegal News
Dennis Schroeder - NREL Photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
US federal court deems Trump’s clean energy grant cancellation illegal

A US federal court ruled Monday that US President Donald Trump’s cancellation of 16 democratic-led states’ clean energy grants was illegal.

In October 2025, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it would cancel over $7.5 billion in clean energy project grants that funded 223 projects across the country. The agency claimed that the grants funded projects that “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”

Funds supported projects that would upgrade battery plants and the electric grid, as well as efforts to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions in 16 states that voted for former vice president Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Conversely, states that voted for Trump continued to receive grant money.

The city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and many environmental groups filed a joint complaint against the Trump administration, arguing that its cancellation of these grants violated the Fifth and First amendments. The case was brought to the District Court for the District of Columbia, where Judge Amit Mehta concluded that the cancellation violated equal protection.

Under the Fifth Amendment, when the government creates classifications in a field and treats classifications differently, the different treatment must be “rationally related to a legitimate government purpose” to be constitutionally valid.

The court concluded that while cancellation of the grants constituted a legitimate government purpose, the classifications of Democratic-led states and Republican-led states were not rationally related to that purpose. The court emphasized the lacking justification, stating:

In fact, Defendants concede that Plaintiffs’ seven terminated grants are “comparable” to awards to grantees in Red States that were not terminated. The only identifiable difference—the grant recipient’s state’s political identity and, specifically, its electoral votes cast against President Trump—does not provide a rational basis for why Defendants chose to terminate Plaintiffs’ grants over others to advance their stated interest of aligning grant funding with agency priorities.

The decision came the same day another federal court ruled that work on an offshore wind farm, that would benefit Rhode Island and Connecticut, may resume.

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