During last fall’s government shutdown, the Trump administration started cutting energy grants to states, but the only states that were seriously affected were ones Donald Trump lost in the 2024 election. At the time, officials in the affected states accused the White House of “mafioso tactics” and brazenly abusing its powers by politicizing grant decisions that are supposed to be based on merit.
Team Trump was initially dismissive of the claims. Russell Vought, the White House budget director who terminated hundreds of grants, insisted that he was simply paring back Biden-era federal grants that the White House considered wasteful because as Vought put it, they were part of a “Green New Scam” — whatever that was supposed to mean.
It wasn’t long, however, before that posture started evolving.
In December, for example, the Republican administration’s lawyers made no real effort to deny the underlying allegations, instead arguing in a court filing that it’s “constitutionally permissible” to consider partisan politics when distributing (or canceling) federal funds.
This week, Team Trump gave up the game, effectively admitting in a legal filing that the “mafioso tactics” claims were correct all along. The New York Times reported:
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 stunning admission offered an unvarnished glimpse into the way 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 White House and the Energy Department did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment, which is just as well, since I seriously doubt even the most creative Republican communications professionals could put a positive spin on developments like these.
The article went on to note, “Federal officials offered the new details about the grant cancellations as part of an agreement with plaintiffs meant to spare the government an exhaustive, evidence-uncovering process known as discovery, the court filings said. That process could have required federal agencies to hand over more damaging records.”
In other words, this is the good version of the developments from the White House’s perspective. The agreement reached by the administration prevented other potential abuses from coming to public light.
We’re talking about a White House that admits it withholds federal resources from states based on local voters casting ballots in ways the president doesn’t like. Not to put too fine a point on this, but that sounds an awful lot like an impeachable offense. It’s a fundamental corruption of how federal tax dollars are allocated.
Making matters worse is the familiarity of the circumstances. Team Trump approves disaster aid requests from red states, while rejecting comparable requests from blue states. Team Trump curtails healthcare funds, but only for states the White House doesn’t like. Team Trump tried to freeze $10 billion in funding for social services programs in five states, but only blue states were impacted. Team Trump launched a supposed crackdown on “fraud” in social insurance programs, but its sole focus is on Democratic cities and states.
Taking stock of the broader dynamic, the Times’ Jamelle Bouie argued last fall, “Trump seems to see Democratic-led states — and the people in them — less as constituents to which he has a set of larger obligations and more as enemies to be pacified and defeated. For Trump, there is no whole people of the United States. There are only his people and his states.”
The Republican White House seems unnervingly eager to prove the observation true.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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