A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has ordered the Department of Energy to reinstate nearly $28 million worth of Biden-era grants that were canceled in early October.
The Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws by specifically targeting funding recipients based on their location in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, the judge determined.
It’s the first time a court has ruled against the energy agency with regards to award terminations, and according to former senior officials who spoke with Latitude Media, the impacts could be sweeping.
The ruling itself is narrow: It orders DOE to vacate the terminations of just the seven awards named in the lawsuit, returning them to their active status. Practically speaking, it isn’t immediately clear what the Monday ruling means for the projects themselves. Most of them were managed by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which was cut in the agency’s reorganization in November.
But as one former senior DOE official explained, the case now lays out a clear framework for other awardees to sue: “If the administration doesn’t reverse all of the terminations, then they should prepare for hundreds of additional similar lawsuits.”
The lawsuit stems from the cancellation of more than 300 awards during the government shutdown last year, at which time OMB director Russ Vought posted on X that nearly $8 billion in funding was being cut for projects in “blue states.” The funding recipients, which include the City of Saint Paul, the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund, sought to reinstate seven grants, destined for projects spanning EV infrastructure, industrial emissions reductions and energy efficiency, among others. These represent just a sliver of the more than $7 billion in cuts that remain in place, however.
Notably, the ruling was made relatively quickly, without the fact-gathering phase that usually follows a complaint. In a filing in late December, the federal government officially stipulated that a primary reason the grants in question were selected for termination was because the recipient was located in a “blue state.” With the basic facts agreed upon, the case became purely a legal question of whether it’s constitutional for the government to cancel grants based on a state’s political identity.
“There is no reason to believe that terminating an award to a recipient located in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Democratic candidates — and, particularly, voted against President Trump — furthers the agency’s energy priorities any more than terminating a similar grant of a recipient in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Republican,” Judge Amit Mehta wrote in the ruling. “In fact, defendants concede that Plaintiffs’ seven terminated grants are “comparable” to awards to grantees in Red States that were not terminated.”
DOE’s “disparate treatment” of grants is clearly visible in programs like the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnership, Mehta added. In that program — which saw 25 total awards canceled in October — only projects in blue states were canceled, while similar projects, located in states that voted for President Trump, were not.
Constitutional guardrails
While the Trump administration faced a wave of lawsuits throughout 2025 over funding cuts in areas like healthcare and education, litigation involving DOE has been sparse, despite the immense scale of the energy cancellations.
This week’s ruling, however, could have effects outside of energy as well. The administration has frozen funding from FEMA, Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Transportation, among others. Most legal challenges currently working their way through the court system rely on the Administrative Procedures Act, arguing the government didn’t follow the legal steps required to cancel funding.
But Mehta’s ruling is an important precedent: The government can’t legally use “blue state” status as a reason to cancel funding.
That’s not to say that the “mere presence of political considerations in an agency action” would violate the Fifth Amendment, Mehta clarified. “This case is unique. Defendants freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily — if not exclusively — based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024.”
The award recipients also argued the terminations violated the First Amendment, both by discriminating based on political viewpoint and by retaliating against protected speech. The government was “intentionally targeting DOE awardees in blue states…in order to punish states and their citizens for their political views,” the suit argued. Mehta rejected that argument, finding the organizations lacked legal standing to bring the claim on behalf of millions of voters in blue states they sought to represent.
DOE and the awardees have until Friday to submit a status report, and to tell the court what they intend to do next.
