Trump administration admits it canceled grants to punish states that didn’t vote for him
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Yet another “scandal that would define any other administration and is a transparently impeachable offense” in Trump 2.0:
When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.
But it wasn’t true.
In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.
The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.
The saga illustrates the stakes as the Trump administration is completing a set of rules that would provide the president even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants. To critics, the new regulation would only make it easier for Mr. Trump to strike wider tranches of congressionally approved funding over political differences.
Of course, with impeachment being a dead letter in this context another remedy would be for the Supreme Court to actually enforce Congress’s constitutional and statutory powers over appropriations, but…well, speaking of dead letters. And I’m beginning to think that the whole “equal sovereign dignity of the states” thing was a bad faith ad hoc doctrinal invention designed to harm one particular statute John Roberts didn’t like that will never be heard from again.