A Department of Energy lawyer has conceded in a federal court filing that 284 green energy grants were selected for cancellation based solely on whether the recipient's state voted Democratic, a direct contradiction of what Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Congress for months.

The filing, submitted by DOE attorney Jeff Novak, states in plain language that the Office of Management and Budget chose which grants to ax from a larger pool not because of cost, performance, or any policy rationale, but because of partisan geography. The Hill first reported on the filing, which landed in a federal docket linked to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The admission sharpens a question that has dogged the administration's green-grant rollback from the start: Was the October cancellation tranche a fiscal decision or a political one? The DOE's own lawyer just answered it, under oath.

OMB picked 284 grants from a list of 624, and nearly all came from blue states

The mechanics matter. DOE compiled an initial list of 624 grants it flagged for potential termination. Novak's filing states that at that stage, "the political identity of the grant recipient's state was not a factor." The list was built on programmatic grounds.

Then OMB stepped in. Director Russell Vought's office selected 284 of those 624 grants for the so-called October notice tranche, the batch that actually got killed. All but one of the 284 had ties to states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and had two senators who caucused with Democrats.

Novak's filing does not dance around the point. Inclusion in the October tranche was not "based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor," he wrote. It was based "solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state."

The remaining 340 grants from the original DOE list have not been canceled. The filing does not explain what distinguished those survivors from the 284 that were cut, beyond the political map.

Vought named 15 blue states by name when he announced the cuts

When Vought announced last year that the administration was cutting nearly $8 billion in green energy-related funding, he did not frame it as a neutral budget exercise. He specifically named 15 states where grants would be eliminated: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state.

Every one of those states voted for Harris. The administration's broader approach to tying federal funding to policy compliance has drawn attention across multiple agencies, but the DOE filing is the first time a government lawyer has stated in court that political identity was the sole criterion for a specific set of cancellations.

A prior court filing by the administration, described as having been submitted last year, had already acknowledged that political affiliation "played a role." The Novak filing goes further, upgrading the language from a contributing factor to the only factor.

Wright told Congress the selection wasn't political, his own lawyer now says otherwise

Energy Secretary Chris Wright repeatedly testified on Capitol Hill that while the timing of the grant cancellation announcement may have been political, the actual selection of which grants to cancel was not. He drew a line between the rollout, which he conceded had political overtones, and the substance, which he insisted was clean.

Novak's filing erases that line. If OMB selected the 284 grants based solely on political identity, then the substance was the politics. There was no separate programmatic filter. The filing says so explicitly.

DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich, responding by email after the filing surfaced, insisted that Wright's prior statements "are still correct." He added a flat denial:

"None of the termination decisions were based on political considerations."

How that denial squares with a court filing in which the department's own lawyer states the opposite is a question Dietderich's email did not address. The filing distinguishes between DOE's original 624-grant list, which Novak says was not political, and OMB's selection of 284 from that list, which he says was entirely political. Dietderich's blanket denial does not acknowledge that distinction.

The gap between what the secretary told Congress and what his lawyer told a federal judge is not a matter of nuance. Wright said politics did not drive the selection. Novak's filing says politics was the only thing that drove it. The administration has yet to explain how both statements can be true at the same time.

Democrats call it 'an astounding admission' of political abuse

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, both top Democrats on energy appropriations, issued a joint statement Friday seizing on the filing. Murray and Kaptur said the administration had now confirmed what critics had long suspected:

"This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: it terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election."

They went further, calling it "an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views." That characterization, "corruptly abused", is the Democrats' framing, not a legal finding. No court has ruled on whether the selection process violated any statute or constitutional provision.

Murray and Kaptur also took direct aim at Wright's credibility. The administration's broader use of executive power to advance policy goals, from DOJ enforcement actions to foreign-policy conditions, has drawn both praise and legal challenges. But the green-grant episode stands apart because the administration's own filing now contradicts the secretary's sworn testimony.

"Secretary Wright swore up and down for months that these project terminations had absolutely nothing to do with politics, and now his lawyers are declaring that, in fact, politics was the only consideration."

Open questions the filing doesn't answer

The Novak filing settles one question, whether OMB used political criteria, but leaves several others unresolved. The court docket does not reveal the case name or the full list of parties from the material provided. No ruling or injunction in response to the filing has been reported.

The identity of the single grant among the 284 that was not tied to a Harris-voting, two-Democratic-senator state remains unknown. So does the precise dollar value of the 284 canceled grants, as distinct from the nearly $8 billion total Vought announced. And the filing does not explain why OMB chose to filter on political identity rather than any of the programmatic factors DOE had already applied.

Conservatives have legitimate reasons to scrutinize green energy spending. Billions in grants authorized under the Biden administration flowed to projects whose cost-effectiveness and market viability were, at best, debatable. The Trump administration's instinct to use executive leverage to reshape federal priorities is not inherently improper, presidents do it, and voters elected this one partly to do exactly that.

But there is a difference between cutting grants because they fail on the merits and cutting them because the recipient's state voted the wrong way. The first is governance. The second is something else entirely, and the administration's own lawyer just told a federal court it was the second.

If the goal was fiscal discipline, the numbers should have done the talking. When the only filter is a political map, the taxpayers who funded those grants, in red states and blue, deserve a better answer than the one the DOE just put on the record.