DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday that the Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause when it canceled clean energy grants in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the last presidential election.
Mehta, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the Department of Energy to restore nearly thirty million dollars in environmental project grants and vacated termination notices for seven of the affected awards, giving that group of recipients a short-term path back to federal funding.
the decision landed in the middle of a broader fight over federal clean energy grants, after a sweeping termination announcement that reached far beyond the handful of awards directly covered by Mehta’s order.
Monday’s ruling addressed only part of the cancellations tied to that announcement, leaving other terminated initiatives outside the restoration order and setting up further litigation over what else, if anything, can be revived through the courts.
The wider cancellation action was expansive, affecting multiple initiatives across many states and totaling more than seven and a half billion dollars, but Mehta’s decision did not extend to all of those terminations.
Scrutiny also centered on timing: the Department of Energy made the cancellation move during a government shutdown, a backdrop that plaintiffs argued amplified concerns about whether normal administrative safeguards were followed.
the legal challenge was filed by the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, along with the Environmental Defense Fund, Interstate Renewable Energy Council, Plug In America, Elevate Energy, and Southeast Community Organization, after the Energy Department moved to end hundreds of awards tied to clean-energy and environmental projects.
The cancellations, announced publicly by Russell Vought, Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, were framed in blunt political terms. Vought announced the cancellations on social media, stating that
“the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled.”
The terminated awards spanned projects that included battery plants, hydrogen technology initiatives, electric grid upgrades, and carbon dioxide capture efforts, with the affected states listed by the plaintiffs and described as states that supported Harris.
Mehta’s equal-protection analysis focused on the alleged classification behind the government action, finding that the administration deliberately grouped grant recipients based on whether their states voted for Trump.
“To ask the question is to answer it,” Mehta wrote, concluding there was no rational relationship between the administration’s stated objective of aligning funding with its priorities and its decision to target only Democratic-leaning states.
“To ask the question is to answer it,” Mehta wrote, concluding there was no rational relationship between the administration’s stated objective of aligning funding with its priorities and its decision to target only Democratic-leaning states.
In practical terms, Mehta’s order required the Department of Energy to unwind the particular termination notices at issue and restore the covered grants, a significant intervention in federal grant administration where agencies typically hold wide discretion over program priorities and compliance decisions.
The judge also pointed to what he called the “unusual” nature of the terminations, highlighting process concerns that, in his view, supported skepticism about the government’s stated rationale.
Mehta noted the terminations were initially delivered on letters with “Department of Energy” typed at the top rather than official letterhead, and he also cited allegations that the DOE spared nearly identical projects in states that voted for Trump.
Equal protection under the Fifth Amendment applies to the federal government, and Mehta’s ruling treated the alleged targeting of recipients based on state voting behavior as the kind of grouping that must, at minimum, have a rational relationship to the government’s stated goals.
At the same time, Mehta rejected the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claims, finding they could not assert the free speech rights of residents in their states, a limit that narrowed the case even as the equal-protection holding required restoration for the covered awards.
The court’s order did not erase the broader political and budget dispute over how the federal government should steer clean-energy spending, but it did require the Department of Energy to reverse course for the specific grants before the court, at least for now.
Some of the higher-profile awards referenced in the dispute involved hydrogen hub projects, including up to more than one billion dollars for California’s hydrogen hub and up to one billion dollars for a hydrogen project in the Pacific Northwest.
Plaintiffs contrasted those cancellations with projects that were reportedly spared, including a Texas hydrogen project and a three-state project involving West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, to support their allegation of selective treatment tied to politics and geography.
For project sponsors, restoration and vacatur can change day-to-day realities quickly, including whether contractors can be kept on schedule, whether staffing plans can proceed, and whether the uncertainty around federal support continues to chill timelines, even as other terminations from the same announcement remain outside the order.
The Energy Department disputed the court’s conclusion and defended its approach as standards-based rather than political. Spokesman Ben Dietderich said officials
“stand by our review process, which evaluated these awards individually and determined they did not meet the standards necessary to justify the continued spending of taxpayer dollars.”
Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, cast the ruling as a rejection of political retaliation in federal spending, saying the court
“recognized that the Trump Department of Energy vindictively canceled projects for clean affordable energy that just happened to be in states disfavored by the Trump administration, in violation of the bedrock Constitutional guarantee that all people in all states have equal protection under the law.”
The ruling’s reach, however, is bounded by what was presented in this case and by the subset of awards directly before Mehta, leaving open what happens to other terminated initiatives and how the Department of Energy documents and defends future decisions involving clean energy grants, especially when large-scale cancellations reverberate across state governments, vendors, and local workforces.
Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the Trump administration’s cancellation of clean energy grants in Democratic-leaning states was unconstitutional. The decision restores $30 million in funding, citing a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause. While the administration argued the move was based on merit, the court found the targeting of specific states was politically motivated and lacked a rational relationship to official government objectives.
