Trump Administration Lawyers Admit Hawaiʻi Funding Cuts Were Partisan

Red state, blue state politics were solidly behind the Trump administration’s cancellation of millions of dollars in clean energy grants for Hawaiʻi last year, according to recent court filings.

Jeff Novak, a lawyer for the U.S. Energy Department, admitted in court documents that when his agency announced in October 2025 it was terminating hundreds of Biden-era grants worth more than $7.5 billion, it wasn’t for the reason given at the time, which was that the projects “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” 

Instead, Novak wrote, the decision was “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.” 

Hawaiʻi, which voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and is represented by an all-Democrat delegation in Congress, had six projects on the Energy Department’s October termination list, representing nearly $68 million in total grant awards. 

U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, who represents Hawaiʻi’s 2nd Congressional District, suspected the terminations were politically motivated all along and told the Star-Advertiser last year that the administration’s public explanation for the cuts was “shibai” 

“This is a political hit list,” she said at the time. 

The grants included $40 million for a renewable energy project to provide backup power to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and civilian communities, funding to expand electric vehicle charging capacity and $5 million for Honolulu-based technology company, Oceanit, toward a system to extract clean hydrogen from wastewater expelled during oil and natural gas production. 

Of the 284 grants ultimately cut, Novak said in court filings that all but one “had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.” 

The funding for hundreds of other grants in Republican states remained untouched.

Tokuda had reason to be suspicious. For example, the same day the Energy Department announced its grant cancellations, Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s director of the Office Management and Budget, posted on social media: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled.” 

Vought then listed the states that would be affected, all of which were controlled by Democrats or leaned that way, particularly in Congress. That list included Hawaiʻi. 

The latest revelations in court records elicited a forceful response from Tokuda, who told Civil Beat in a written statement that Congress needs to “wake up and take back its constitutional power to decide how tax dollars are spent.” 

"The Department of Energy's admissions under oath confirm what we've been saying all along: This administration isn't just weaponizing federal funding, it is holding states hostage and making working families pay the price,” she said. 

“When Congress appropriated these funds and these projects were awarded, it wasn't about politics. It was about lowering energy costs, strengthening our energy security, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and creating billions of dollars' worth of good-paying American jobs. Instead, this administration is deliberately delaying those benefits to punish communities that didn't vote for the President.”

U.S. Rep. Ed Case lobbed similar criticism at the Trump administration in a written statement. He said the cuts, especially those undermining energy resiliency at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, were "wrong on policy and the law."

"We are seeing the very real consequences and impact on our Hawai'i," Case said. “The admittance of these awards being cancelled for political reasons should concern every American regardless of party."

The Energy Department’s admission, first reported by the New York Times, came as lawyers for the agency were responding to a lawsuit filed by California researchers to challenge the funding cuts. But it’s not the first time the administration has conceded it was basing its decision on political leanings. 

In a separate lawsuit filed in Minnesota over the termination of the grants, government lawyers said in a December court filing that “consideration of partisan politics is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”

Officials at the Energy Department did not respond to Civil Beat's request for comment.

The energy grants terminated by the administration represent just a fraction of the total number that have been eliminated in the islands since Trump retook office. For instance, Marc Arakaki, a spokesperson for the University of Hawaiʻi, said that since 2025, the Trump administration has terminated 87 grants and placed stop work orders on four others that were previously awarded to the school. The total award amounts for those grants was more than $110 million.