The Department of Energy has admitted in court that nearly 300 energy projects were terminated because they were in states that did not vote for the President in the 2024 election, a filing that cuts against months of denials from Secretary Chris Wright. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and Senator Patty Murray responded on behalf of the affected projects, saying the terminations were not tied to performance or cost.
The disclosure matters because it turns a fight over funding into an open question of motive. On October 1, 2025, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought posted that nearly $8 Billion in cost-cutting energy funding was being terminated, and he listed CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT and WA as the states where the projects were located. Hours later, the Department of Energy announced that hundreds of projects had been terminated.
Last week, lawyers for Wright went further than his public statements ever had. In a court filing that was recently made public, they said none of the terminated grants were cut for any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based reason. They also said the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, and that DOE would not look beyond the prime grantee to weigh downstream beneficiaries. That admission lands squarely against Wright’s repeated claim that politics had nothing to do with the decision.
The statement from Kaptur and Murray says the terminations happened last October during the government shutdown, when the administration moved quickly against the projects. It does not identify each project by name, but it does define the rule the department says it used: state political identity, not project merit. That is the key point now, because the filing leaves little room for the department to argue that the cuts were an ordinary review of federal spending.
What happens next is narrower but sharper than before. Several courts had already ruled against the terminations, and the public filing now gives opponents a direct admission to press in any further challenge. The unanswered question is no longer whether the department acted on politics; it is how far that admission will carry when the terminations are tested again.
