EatMoreSalmon said:
boognish_bear said:
I'd read the article, but I'm not paying the NYT anything to do so. What are the article's supporting documents? Do they link to them, or do they just tell readers what the documents say?
FWIW... this is what Claude spit out...
The core facts:
In October 2025, the Trump administration canceled roughly $7.57.6 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants, publicly framing it as cutting wasteful spending.
In court filings this month (a lawsuit brought by California researchers over the cancellations), a Department of Energy lawyer admitted the real basis: "With one exception, the 284 terminated grants 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 filing also said none of the grants were cut for any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance reason.
Meanwhile, hundreds of energy grants in Republican-represented, Trump-voting states were left untouched even ones the Energy Department had itself recommended for cancellation.
Here's what I found on the actual case, docket, and documents though full court filings sit behind PACER, which isn't publicly linkable, so I'll point you to where they're discussed/hosted:
The case: California v. Wright, filed in the Northern District of California (Chris Wright is the current Energy Secretary). It challenges DOE and OMB's termination of billions in congressionally-appropriated energy/infrastructure grants. The Oregon DOJ's litigation tracker confirms this docket and that motions were pending as of April 27, 2026, when federal defendants filed a motion to dismiss and to transfer the case.
The ruling with the "based solely" language: U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued a 17-page opinion (around January 1213, 2026) finding the terminations unconstitutional. The key line, quoted directly from his opinion: "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." Multiple outlets (OPB, CT Mirror, AP/Yahoo) reproduced this same quote from the opinion, which is a strong sign they're all drawing from the actual written ruling rather than secondhand spin.
A closely related but separate case: There's also Thakur v. Trump, a UC researchers' class action (also N.D. Cal., case involves related grant terminations but different plaintiffs/grants some DOE research grants). In that one, federal agencies admitted in signed stipulations that they didn't terminate grants for noncompliance but used general political criteria instead. Don't conflate the two they're separate suits with overlapping fact patterns.
Where to actually read the documents:
Judge Mehta's opinion isn't on a free public court site I can fetch directly, but outlets like OPB, CT Mirror, and Latitude Media (a trade outlet that covers this closely) have posted lengthy excerpts and analysis with direct quotes from the ruling Latitude Media's piece goes deepest on the DOE-specific reasoning.
For primary documents, PACER (federal court records system, paid) or a free mirror like CourtListener/RECAP (courtlistener.com) would have the actual stipulations and opinion if someone's uploaded them search "California v. Wright" or "Thakur v. Trump" there.
The UC researchers' own case-tracking site (ucresearchergrantterminations.com) posts primary source documents including the original complaint and press releases, for the Thakur-adjacent litigation.
