Trump admin's 'remarkably candid admission' flagged in new court filing

President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies aren't shy about berating users of green energy, from Democratic-controlled states in the U.S. to countries in the European Union (EU). Trump believes that EU countries need to increase their use of fossil fuels, and he attacked the UK (which left the EU) for using wind energy during a meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Part of the Trump administration's energy policy involves energy grants to individual U.S. states. And according to The Washington Post, government lawyers admitted in a Monday court filing that the decision to cut energy grants was based on partisanship.

Post reporters Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson, in an article published on Wednesday, explain, "The Trump Administration acknowledged, in a court filing this week, that a decision to cut energy grants during the government shutdown was influenced by whether the money would go to a state that tended to elect Democrats statewide or nationally. Government lawyers also wrote in the filing that 'consideration of partisan politics is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.'"

The "remarkably candid admission" in the filing, according to Kornfield and Natanson, "echoes" Trump's "frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops."

The "admission," the Post reporters add, "could also raise the possibility that federal attorneys might make similar arguments in legal challenges to other unilateral cuts implemented by the (Trump) Administration for blue cities and states."

"A coalition of Minnesota clean energy groups and the city of St. Paul sued the Trump Administration last month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Energy Department announced it was slashing 321 grants of about $7.5 billion," Kornfield and Natanson report. "The cuts included projects to kick-start the hydrogen industry in California, upgrade the electricity grid serving Indigenous communities in New Mexico and generate new energy mostly from wind and solar in Minnesota. At the time, Trump's budget director, Russell Vought, touted the cuts on X, declaring 'nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being canceled' and listed blue states."

Legal experts interviewed by the Post laid out some reasons why they find Trump allies' actions troubling.

Dan Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Post, "It really undermines the idea that you're passing neutral laws that you know are supposed to apply equally to everybody. I find it really startling they would make that concession."

David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, told the Post, "I cannot believe that the Supreme Court would want to allow a partisan tit-for-tat to develop with each party pulling grants from its perceived partisan foes, but one can never be entirely certain these days."

Read Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson's full article for the Washington Post at this link (subscription required).