DOE head says agency didn’t punish blue states. His lawyers admit it did.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright was unrepentant on Capitol Hill this week, firing back at a congressman’s charge that the Trump administration canceled clean energy projects in blue states to exact political revenge.

“No decisions were made on politics,” Wright told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on Wednesday. “I keep hearing that charge. It’s [expletive]. We’re going to say it a million times. It’s not true. It’s actually false.”

Across town, a federal judge was drafting a court order based on Wright’s lawyers admitting the Energy Department had done just that. The Thursday ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in D.C. restored 11 clean energy grants in states President Donald Trump lost in 2024; government attorneys had acknowledged those election results influenced why the funding was nixed.

According to the filings, the lawyers, representing Wright as the case’s top named defendant, agreed that “a primary reason for the termination decisions at issue is because of location in blue states.”

They agreed to the stipulation under the condition that it would allow Wright and other Trump officials to avoid a trial and a potentially lengthy and embarrassing discovery process, in which private communications around how the projects were targeted would be made public.

It was the second time the administration was ordered to restore grants from a batch of 314 that were terminated in October, totaling nearly $8 billion in federal funding. In January, Mehta cited the administration’s admission that it targeted Democratic-leaning states when he ordered the restoration of seven grants in another case where Wright was a defendant. The judge found the awards were similar to others in Republican-leaning states that were not canceled.

The Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment. At the congressional hearing Wednesday, Wright suggested that the awards involved in the court cases are an anomaly and that his department did not make the decision to terminate them, without elaborating on where those decisions were made.

“For all 314 awards — 100% — the grantee’s address on file with the federal government is a state that voted for Vice President Harris in the 2024 election and that has two Democratic caucusing Senators,” said the complaint from a group of grant recipients, including the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, in the latest case. “One need not be a statistician to understand this partisan skew did not happen by chance.”

At the time the projects were defunded, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought made a point of underscoring that they were in blue states, listing all 16. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” Vought posted on X on Oct. 1.

“Our allegation was the reason these projects were terminated was because they are located in blue states,” said John Robinson, an attorney for the plaintiffs who had their grants restored this week. “The court found that to be true. The government has never come forward with another explanation for why these projects were targeted. The record speaks for itself.”

The just-restored grants include $36.5 million for the chemical engineering institute’s pursuit of clean hydrogen-related technologies, as well as a $2.5 million award to Sperra, formerly called RCAM Technologies, to design “a 3D-printed concrete suction anchor for use in a variety of offshore energy applications.”

Robinson said his clients remain eager to pursue their projects and anticipate moving forward.

Wright told a congressional committee in April that the Energy Department would be appealing Mehta’s earlier ruling, but court records show the department never filed that appeal.

Meanwhile, the department is facing other lawsuits alleging it illegally canceled grant funds to pay for major initiatives, including the development of clean fuels for heavy industry and new efficiency standards for commercial buildings, in pursuit of a political agenda. They include a suit filed in February by California and a dozen other states alleging an “unjustifiably partisan plan to punish Blue States through DOE’s rushed and chaotic termination of statutorily mandated programs.”