A US district judge ruled that Trump’s decision singled out states that voted for Democrats in the 2024 elections.

A United States judge has ruled that the administration of President Donald Trump acted illegally when it cancelled the payment of $7.6bn in clean energy grants to states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

In a decision on Monday, US District Judge Amit Mehta said the administration’s actions violated the Constitution’s equal protection requirements.

“Defendants freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily – if not exclusively – based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024,” Mehta wrote in a summary of the case.

The grants were intended to support hundreds of clean energy projects across 16 states, including California, Colorado, New Jersey and Washington state. The projects included initiatives to create battery plants and hydrogen technology.

But projects in those states were cancelled in October, as the Trump administration sought to ratchet up pressure on Democratic-led states during a heated government shutdown.

At the time, Trump told the network One America News (OAN) that he would take aim at projects closely associated with the Democratic Party.

“We could cut projects that they wanted, favourite projects, and they’d be permanently cut,” he told the network.

Russell Vought, the Trump-appointed director for the Office of Management and Budget, posted on social media that month that “funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda” had been “cancelled”.

The cuts included up to $1.2bn for a hub in California aimed at accelerating hydrogen technology, and up to $1bn for a hydrogen project in the Pacific Northwest.

St Paul, Minnesota, was among the jurisdictions affected by the grant cuts. The city and a coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit to contest the Trump administration’s decision.

Second legal setback

A spokesperson for the US Department of Energy, however, said the Trump administration disagrees with the judge’s ruling.

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”, spokesman Ben Dietderich said.

The Trump administration has repeatedly pledged to cut back on what it considers wasteful government spending.

Monday’s ruling was the second legal setback in just a matter of hours for Trump’s efforts to roll back the clean energy programmes in the US.

A separate federal judge ruled on Monday that work on a major offshore wind farm for Rhode Island and Connecticut can resume, handing the industry at least a temporary victory as Trump seeks to shut it down.

The US president campaigned for the White House on a promise to end the offshore wind industry, saying electric wind turbines – sometimes called windmills – are too expensive and hurt whales and birds.

Instead, Trump has pushed for the US to ramp up fossil fuel production, considered the primary contributor to climate change. The US president has repeatedly defied scientific consensus on climate change and referred to it as a “hoax”.