Trump admin targets blue-state grants meant to ease US electricity woes

The Trump administration has declared it will claw back billions of dollars in federal funding that utilities and other recipients are using to strengthen power grids and reduce electricity prices — almost entirely in states that voted for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. 

In a Wednesday post on X, Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, declared the administration would cancel ​“nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda.” He listed 16 states that would lose project funding — every single one of which voted for Harris last year.

Democrats reacted with fury, saying the Trump administration is abusing its power in an attempt to force Democrats to concede to Republican demands in a congressional budget dispute that has led to the current federal government shutdown. 

On Thursday morning, the Department of Energy announced the ​“termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects,” which it claimed would save American taxpayers $7.56 billion. The DOE has not disclosed which grants or projects it has targeted for termination. The agency did not respond to Canary Media’s requests for comment. 

“Donald Trump’s decision to cancel 223 energy projects in 21 states was nakedly political, unhinged, and unlawful,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat who serves as ranking member on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, in a statement. ​“These are projects that Congress already approved and funded — projects that create jobs, lower electricity costs, and move our country forward.” 

Two separate sources have provided Canary Media with a list of the 321 grants being targeted by the DOE. The vast majority are indeed in blue states. 

The DOE stated that the terminated projects ​“did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” But the partisan breakdown of cancellations appears to belie that statement. 

The list includes 26 grants issued by the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office (GDO) under a program created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to expand the country’s struggling transmission network, harden the grid against extreme weather, build microgrids to protect vulnerable communities during power outages, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries into the grid. 

The 26 GDO grants slated for cancellation are exclusively in the states that Vought singled out in his Wednesday X post: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. 

Meanwhile, the DOE’s termination list does not include dozens more GDO grants issued in 2023, August 2024, and October 2024 for utility projects in states that voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Many of those projects are strikingly similar to the ones marked for cancellation in blue states. 

“This will result in lost jobs, stranded investments, increasing energy prices — all the things the administration says out of the other side of their mouth that they’re working against,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental groups. 

“Even on their own terms — ​‘We’re going to damage those Democrats in the blue states!’ — they’re full of shit,” he added. ​“Energy does not abide by state boundaries. Electrons flow, supply chains flow, markets are often regional or national in nature. Anytime you destroy a project in one part of the country, it’s going to affect another part of the country.” 

Some of the GDO grants set for termination are helping to finance core transmission grid infrastructure projects that will span red and blue states alike. 

For example, in 2023 the Minnesota Department of Commerce, which is named on the DOE’s list, was awarded a $464 million grant to be backed by $1.3 billion from members of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states. Those combined funds were meant to help finance a set of new transmission lines that will connect the grids between the two regions.

Lack of transmission capacity has driven up power prices across the Midwest and stymied development of lower-cost wind and solar projects that could reduce utility bills. The DOE previously estimated that the transmission built through this initiative could enable an additional 35 gigawatts of clean energy to be brought onto the grid by 2030.

Other grants targeted for termination are more state-specific. For example, in Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs and utility Portland General Electric were awarded $250 million to upgrade transmission grid capacity to connect clean energy projects in the eastern part of the state with the state’s urban centers west of the Cascade Mountains. 

The California Energy Commission, also on the list, last year received a $600 million federal grant to upgrade 100 miles of electric transmission lines with high-tech power cables that are lighter, stronger, and able to carry more electricity than traditional ones. 

Several grants intended to improve grid resilience by adding more clean energy are also slated for cancellation. Maryland utility Baltimore Gas & Electric, Illinois utility Commonwealth Edison, California utility Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and National Grid in New York and Massachusetts were awarded $50 million apiece to help integrate rooftop solar, backup batteries, and other distributed energy resources into their grids. 

And Allete, a Minnesota-based energy company on the list, received a $50 million grant for subsidiary Minnesota Power to modernize its transmission system.

The list also targets investments in microgrids — combinations of on-site generation, solar, batteries, and power-control systems that serve critical facilities like hospitals and emergency centers. California’s Redwood Coast Energy Authority was awarded $88 million for a project that will finance the development of microgrids on the lands of Northern California’s Hoopa Valley, Yurok, Karuk, and Blue Lake Rancheria tribes. New Mexico’s Kit Carson Electric Cooperative won a $15.4 million grant to build a battery resiliency project. And the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities in New York received a $17 million grant for a community microgrid project. 

The DOE had previously determined that these co-investments from the federal government were important for bolstering grid reliability in the face of increasingly extreme weather. 

Similar grants awarded to utilities in states that voted for Trump have not been singled out for cancellation. That includes grid-hardening grants for Gulf Coast utility Entergy ($53.8 million), Michigan utility Consumers Energy ($100 million), and Pennsylvania’s PECO Energy ($100 million). Also spared were grants for resiliency projects such as $249 million to deploy microgrids across Louisiana, and grid-enhancing technology deployments such as a $160 million grant for utility Georgia Power to deploy advanced power cables and ​“dynamic line rating” technologies to expand the capacity of its transmission network.

It’s unclear how and when the threatened cuts will take effect, Walsh said. The ongoing government shutdown has scrambled communications with the DOE officials in charge of managing the grants set for termination. Grantees have the right to challenge the terminations with the DOE and in court.

“I hope a lot of them avail themselves of that,” he said. ​“The Trump administration is doing this stuff even when they don’t necessarily believe they can win in the courts. Part of the strategy is to make this so difficult that project developers or investors just walk away because the administration has elevated the risk to an unacceptable level.”

A correction was made on Oct. 3, 2025: This story originally incorrectly identified a $700 million grant to the Montana Department of Commerce for the North Plains Connector project as being on a list of Department of Energy grants targeted for termination. The project is not on the list.