Last September, the Department of Energy (DOE) recommended cancellation of 624 grants for clean energy projects that had been approved by the Biden administration. After reviewing the list, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) winnowed it down to 284 grants, all but one of which had been awarded to projects in states that were represented by Democrats in the U.S. Senate and had voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
"No decisions were made on politics," Energy Secretary Chris Wright improbably insisted during a House hearing on June 10. "I keep hearing that charge. It's bullshit." While that might have been true of the DOE's original list, it was not true of the grant terminations that the OMB ultimately approved. A month after Wright's testimony, DOE Principal Deputy General Counsel Jeff Novak admitted that the OMB's decisions about which grants to cancel were "based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state," as opposed to "any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor."
