Punishing the Blue: A President Weaponizes the Purse Against His Own Country
Federal officials have now admitted in sworn court filings that $7.6 billion in congressionally approved clean-energy funding was cancelled for one reason alone — the states did not vote for Donald Trump. It is one of the most brazen abuses of executive power in modern American history, and a federal judge has already ruled it unconstitutional.
There is a difference between a president who governs a country and a president who runs a protection racket. That difference is now measured in court filings, and it comes to $7.6 billion. In little-noticed stipulations filed this month in the class-action case Thakur v. Trump, lawyers for the Department of Energy conceded what the administration spent nine months denying: the mass cancellation of clean-energy grants in October 2025 was not about waste, not about efficiency, and not about “the nation’s energy needs.” It was based solely, as The New York Times first reported, on whether the recipient sat in a state that had voted for Kamala Harris.
The states affected were named in a social-media post by the president’s own budget director. All sixteen of them — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington — went for Harris in 2024. Every single one. The projects that lost their funding were not obscure or ideological. They were battery plants, hydrogen hubs, grid upgrades, carbon-capture pilots, and the workaday infrastructure of a modern energy economy. The people who lost their jobs, contracts, and community investments were not Democratic operatives. They were welders, engineers, contractors, university researchers, and municipal workers in the very states whose tax dollars fund the federal government.
What the administration did is now the subject of active litigation, a federal ruling of unconstitutionality, an Inspector General audit, and demands from members of Congress for a full investigation. What it says about the president’s leadership, his priorities, and his fitness to hold the office is a subject we can no longer defer.
I. The Admission Nobody Was Supposed to See
When the White House terminated more than 300 clean-energy awards in October 2025, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought took to X to declare that the “Left’s climate agenda” was being cancelled. Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s department issued a press release insisting the awards had failed a “thorough, individualized financial review.” The pitch to the public was fiscal responsibility: taxpayer dollars rescued from waste.
Nine months later, that story collapsed inside a courtroom. In a July 15, 2026 stipulation filed in the Northern District of California, DOE Principal Deputy General Counsel Jeffrey Novak conceded, in the government’s own words, that with a single exception every one of the 284 terminated grants had its recipient location or place of performance in what the filing candidly called a “Blue State” — a state that had awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris and had two Democratic-caucusing senators. The remaining 340 grants on the original chopping list — all in red states or states with at least one Republican senator — were spared.
Six months earlier, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta had already ruled in a parallel case that the administration violated the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. In a seventeen-page opinion, Mehta wrote that the government made grant-termination decisions primarily — if not exclusively — based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump. The court found the administration could not articulate any rational government interest advanced by that classification. It couldn’t articulate one because there wasn’t one to articulate.
“This mass partisan retribution is appalling, outrageous, dangerous, lawless, unconstitutional, unpatriotic and a massive offense against the Republic.”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee
II. What $7.6 Billion Would Have Built
To understand the scale of what was taken away, one has to look past the accounting and at the actual work. The projects that were cancelled were not “climate agenda” abstractions. They were physical things — steel, copper, concrete, and payroll — that were already under contract or in development. Senator Alex Padilla’s office has documented that California alone lost 79 grants worth roughly $2.1 billion, plus another $1.2 billion tied to the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, or ARCHES — a hydrogen hub projected to create more than 200,000 jobs across trucking, port operations, manufacturing, and public transit.
Total Cancelled
Federal clean-energy grants terminated in October 2025 across 16 states, all of which voted for Kamala Harris. Source: AP.
Grants Terminated
Of roughly 600 grants DOE flagged, only those in blue states were cut. The 340 in red states were spared. Source: court stipulation.
California Alone
79 grants plus the ARCHES hydrogen hub — a project projected to create over 200,000 jobs, according to state officials. Source: Sen. Padilla.
States Punished
Every state on OMB Director Vought’s public target list voted for Harris in 2024. Not one exception. Source: CNN.
These are congressionally appropriated dollars. They were authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, both signed into law and neither repealed. The money exists. Congress voted for it. The workers were hired for it. The permits were pulled for it. And then a single email from OMB made it disappear — for citizens in some states, but not others, based only on how they voted.
III. Where the Money Actually Ends Up
When a president withholds appropriated funds, the money does not vanish into the ether. It goes somewhere. In the immediate accounting, cancelled grant funds return to the Treasury as unobligated balances. But in practice, the administration has used those balances as a floating slush account to shift toward its own priorities — the president’s chosen infrastructure and political favors — bypassing the appropriations Congress has already made.
This is not a theoretical concern. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented a systematic effort by the second Trump administration to stretch or ignore the Impoundment Control Act, treating congressional appropriations as ceilings rather than commitments. Earlier this year, the administration attempted to freeze $10 billion in social-services funding to five blue states before backing down under legal pressure. In February, FEMA released $5 billion in long-delayed disaster aid — but left out Democratic-led states where the president had clashed with the governors. The pattern is identical: reward friends, starve enemies, and dare the courts to catch up.
What this means for the average American is direct and material. If you live in one of those sixteen states, a grid upgrade that would have hardened your community against blackouts was cancelled. A battery plant that would have hired hundreds is on ice. A university lab studying methane leakage lost its funding, and its graduate students lost their positions. If you live in a state that voted for the president, your taxes are still being collected — but the federal government is redirecting the return on those taxes based on the partisan lean of your zip code. Every American, red or blue, pays into a system that is now being run as a rewards program for the president’s coalition.
IV. The Law Is Not Ambiguous
The Constitution places the power of the purse squarely with Congress. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 is one of the least ambiguous sentences in the founding document: money is drawn from the Treasury only in consequence of appropriations made by law. When Congress appropriates, the executive branch is obligated to spend, unless Congress itself provides an off-ramp. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was enacted precisely because Richard Nixon tried to do a smaller version of what this administration is doing now, and Congress moved with unusual speed to close the door.
Under that statute, if a president wants to cancel or delay appropriated funds, he must send a special message to Congress explaining the proposed rescission. He may then withhold the funds for up to 45 legislative days. If Congress does not enact the rescission into law within that window, the funds must be made available for obligation. There is no other legal path. The Supreme Court reinforced this framework in Train v. City of New York in 1975, and again in Clinton v. City of New York in 1998, when it struck down the Line Item Veto Act on the ground that only Congress can amend a spending law.
What the administration did in October 2025 was neither a rescission notice nor an authorized withholding. It was an unlawful termination dressed as an agency review. Judge Mehta’s ruling this January made that explicit. A second federal judge, ruling later the same day, ordered work to resume on a Rhode Island-Connecticut offshore wind project the administration had tried to kill. The courts are, so far, doing exactly what the courts were designed to do. But the courts alone cannot fix a president who treats “unconstitutional” as a cost of doing business.
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V. The Divisiveness That Breeds Contempt — and Worse
There is a reason presidents from Washington to Biden — with varying degrees of sincerity — have paid at least rhetorical homage to the idea that they govern the whole country. It is not because they were all civically virtuous. It is because the alternative is corrosive in ways that go past politics and reach the foundations of civic life. When Americans in one state watch their federal tax dollars fund projects in a neighboring state, while their own community’s grants are cancelled by name, the message is unmistakable: your vote made you a lesser citizen. That is not a message a democratic republic can absorb indefinitely.
The consequences are already visible. Governors of the punished states have begun openly questioning why they should continue full cooperation with a federal government that treats them as enemies. Community leaders in cancelled-project towns describe a sense of betrayal that is hardening into distrust of federal institutions writ large — a distrust that will outlast this president. Political scientists and threat-assessment researchers have long warned that when partisan retaliation is normalized at the highest levels of government, the risk of localized political violence rises with it. The Department of Homeland Security’s own advisories over the past decade have identified perceived governmental illegitimacy as one of the strongest predictors of extremist mobilization. The president is now personally, publicly, and admittedly manufacturing that perception.
This is the toll that does not appear on a spreadsheet. It is measured in the eroding assumption that Americans, wherever they live, share a common government. Once that assumption is broken, it is very hard to rebuild.
“Unprecedented Trumpism, and something we should never become numb to.”
— Sen. Chuck Schumer, on the DOE court admission
VI. Congress and the States Fight Back
The response from Democratic lawmakers has been immediate, but its unevenness reveals the deeper problem. In the Senate, Chuck Schumer condemned the admission as unprecedented. Sen. Alex Padilla, joined by Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, led 26 members of the California delegation in demanding an independent Inspector General audit, which the DOE watchdog agreed to open. Rep. Marcy Kaptur and Sen. Patty Murray, both on the Appropriations Committees, issued a joint statement calling the conduct “outright un-American.” Rep. Mike Levin filed a formal congressional inquiry.
The states themselves have moved through the courts. The Thakur v. Trump case, brought by University of California researchers, is now approaching summary judgment. A separate suit filed by clean-energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, produced the initial January ruling that vacated seven cancellations. In American Institute of Chemical Engineers v. Wright, Judge Mehta approved a stipulated judgment restoring eleven additional grants. Attorneys general from multiple affected states are coordinating on a broader challenge.
What is still missing is congressional Republican voices willing to defend Congress’s own constitutional prerogatives. The power of the purse belongs to the legislature, not to one party’s legislature. Every Republican who stays silent while a president of their party unilaterally cancels their own institution’s appropriations is, in effect, ceding Article I to the White House. That surrender will outlast this president too.
VII. How We Got Here — A Timeline
When a President Governs Only Half the Country, What Remedy Is Left?
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 after the Kennedy assassination, provides two paths for addressing a president unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. Section 3 allows a president to voluntarily transfer power. Section 4 — the one now debated — allows the vice president, together with a majority of Cabinet officers or a body Congress designates, to declare the president unfit and transfer power to the vice president. If the president contests, Congress must decide by two-thirds vote in both chambers.
The purpose of Section 4 is not to litigate policy disagreements. It is to address a president who is, in the amendment’s plain language, “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The framers of the amendment understood inability broadly — physical, cognitive, or, as constitutional scholars have long argued, a demonstrated inability to execute the office as an office of the whole nation rather than as an instrument of personal or partisan will.
Who Is Calling For It
On April 10, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the White House physician demanding a full cognitive evaluation of the president. Four days later, Raskin introduced legislation with 50 co-sponsors to establish a bipartisan Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity under the amendment’s own authorizing language. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed have entered into the Congressional Record a statement from neurologists and forensic psychiatrists warning of a deteriorated mental state. Sen. Chris Murphy and Sen. Bernie Sanders have called for the amendment’s invocation on the floor.
The Argument From This Case
The grant cancellations are not, standing alone, grounds for the 25th Amendment. But they are evidence of a pattern the amendment was written to address. A president who publicly admits, through his own lawyers in a federal court filing, that he distributes federal benefits based on which citizens voted for him has demonstrated an incapacity — moral, constitutional, or cognitive — to execute the office he swore to hold. When combined with erratic public conduct, unilateral war-making, and the administration’s own budget director boasting about targeting “Blue States” by name, a reasonable body of Cabinet officers has more than enough to convene.
The Barriers Are Real. They Do Not Negate the Case.
The practical obstacles are formidable. Section 4 requires the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, both hand-picked for loyalty. Congress, if the president contests, requires a two-thirds supermajority. Neither is likely to materialize under current conditions. But the point of documenting the constitutional argument is not to predict the political outcome. It is to establish the historical record. The refusal of a compliant Cabinet to act does not erase the underlying incapacity; it only distributes the responsibility for it. History will judge every Cabinet officer who watched a president admit, in court, that he treated American citizens as enemies of state — and did nothing.
Editorial Conclusion
The president of the United States has admitted, through his own government’s lawyers, that he directed the cancellation of billions of dollars in congressionally approved funds because the recipients lived in the wrong states. A federal judge has already ruled the conduct unconstitutional. The Congress that appropriated the money has a duty — not a preference, a duty — to reclaim its Article I authority, restore the funds, and hold accountable the officials who executed the scheme.
What is at stake is not a policy dispute over energy. It is whether the federal government of the United States still belongs to all of its citizens, or only to those who voted correctly. There is only one acceptable answer to that question, and every American — in every state, of every party — should be prepared to demand it.
Sources & References
- The New York Times — Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him
- Associated Press — Court says Trump admin illegally blocked billions in clean energy grants to Democratic states
- CNN Politics — Trump administration admits it canceled clean-energy grants in states that voted for Kamala Harris
- Democracy Docket — Energy Dept. admits cancelling federal clean energy grants in blue states
- Reuters — Trump administration cuts nearly $8 billion in clean energy projects in blue states
- Election Law Blog — Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him
- The New Republic — Trump Team Admits He’s Been Defunding States That Didn’t Vote for Him
- Sen. Alex Padilla — DOE Watchdog Agrees to Padilla-Schiff-Lofgren Request for Independent Audit
- Rep. Mark Takano — Takano Blasts Trump’s Cancelation of $1B+ in California Clean Energy Grants
- Congress.gov / CRS — The Impoundment Control Act of 1974: Background and Congressional Consideration
- U.S. GAO — Impoundment Control Act — Overview and GAO Role
- Center on Budget & Policy Priorities — FAQs on Impoundment: Presidential Actions Are Constrained by the Constitution
- Constitution Annotated — Impounding Appropriated Funds — Constitutional Framework
- Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse — Thakur v. Trump — Case Docket and History
- Farella Braun + Martel — Thakur v. Trump: Defending the Rule of Law
- House Judiciary Democrats — Raskin Demands Cognitive Evaluation of the President, Amid Calls to Invoke 25th Amendment
- Mediaite — House Democrats File Bill to Form 25th Amendment Commission
- The Hill — Concerns Grow Over Trump’s Mental Fitness for the Presidency
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