A win! A federal judge ruled that the Department of Energy must immediately restore nearly $28 million in environmental grant funding after determining the money was unlawfully withheld from recipients in states Trump lost in the 2024 presidential election to Kamala Harris.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found that the DOE’s actions amounted to unconstitutional discrimination, violating the Fifth Amendment by deliberately targeting states based solely on how their residents voted in a federal election. The court concluded that federal funds were conditioned on political outcomes, an act fundamentally incompatible with constitutional governance. While the judge dismissed separate First Amendment claims, he was unequivocal that the selective cancellation of grants crossed a constitutional line.
“The key question is whether Defendants’ deliberate grouping of awardees based on whether the state in which they reside voted for President Trump is rationally related to DOE’s stated objective of aligning grant funding with the new administration’s priorities,” Mehta wrote. “To ask the question is to answer it.”
The ruling underscores a core constitutional principle that the federal government cannot punish states or their residents for exercising their right to vote by withholding public funds based on election results.
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