Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) on Saturday accused President Donald Trump of violating his constitutional obligations to the American people, days after the Trump administration admitted in federal court that it canceled billions of dollars in grants to states based solely on how they voted in the 2024 election. In a post on X published at 12:00 PM on August 1, 2026, Beyer wrote that the presidency carries a duty that does not bend to political loyalty, delivering one of the sharpest rebukes yet from a sitting member of Congress over the administration’s use of federal funding as a political weapon.
The full text of Beyer’s post reads: “The President of the United States has a constitutional responsibility to faithfully serve every American, not just those who agree with his politics.”
The statement was posted in direct response to a July 24, 2026, New York Times investigation revealing that federal officials had conceded in court documents that the administration terminated more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants “based solely” on whether the recipient states had voted for Trump or for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
According to that reporting, the Energy Department had initially compiled a list recommending the cancellation of more than 600 Biden-era grants after a broader agency-wide funding review. But the White House Office of Management and Budget, led by Director Russell T. Vought, ultimately terminated only 284 of them in October. A lawyer for the Energy Department later acknowledged in a court filing that “with one exception,” every one of the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location in a state that voted for Harris in 2024 and was represented by two Democratic senators, and that none of the cancellations were made “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”
By contrast, the government confirmed that hundreds of additional grants recommended for termination in Republican-led states that had backed Trump were left untouched, even though the Energy Department’s internal review had flagged them for the same reasons cited to justify the cuts in Democratic states. When Vought announced the October cancellations, he framed them in explicitly partisan terms, writing on social media that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled.” [
The revelations also appeared to contradict sworn congressional testimony from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who told a House hearing in June that “no decisions were made on politics.” Energy Department spokesman Ben Dietderich disputed that any contradiction existed, telling the Times that Wright had been drawing a distinction between the agency’s initial review process and the later political timing of the cancellation announcements, and that “any suggestion of a contradiction is a misrepresentation of the court filing.”
The cancellations landed hardest on clean energy infrastructure in Democratic-led states, halting funding for electrical grid upgrades in California and Oregon, methane-reduction efforts at oil and gas operations in Colorado, and hydrogen fuel production hubs spanning California and the Pacific Northwest. Several grant recipients have since sued the administration in an effort to restore the funding, and it was one of those lawsuits, filed by California researchers, that produced the government’s admission.
Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), the top Democrats on their chambers’ respective appropriations panels, condemned the disclosure in a joint statement Friday, calling the grant terminations “an outright un-American” abuse of power. “This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views,” they said.
Beyer’s post fits a pattern he has established throughout Trump’s second term of publicly challenging the administration’s use of federal funding as a tool of political retaliation. In July 2025, Beyer appeared at a House Science Committee Democrats event titled “The Things We’ll Never Know: A Science Fair of Canceled Grants,” where he told researchers whose funding had been stripped by the administration that he had “been working around the clock with my constituents who have been impacted by the many cuts to federal funding and the workforce,” adding that the National Science Foundation, located in his Northern Virginia district, had been “forced to cancel over one billion dollars in research grants” under DOGE and White House direction.
Beyer, who represents Virginia’s 8th District and previously served as a U.S. Ambassador in the State Department, also co-chairs the House’s bicameral Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. In that capacity, he joined Representative John Garamendi and Representative Brad Sherman earlier this year in a statement warning that a proposed U.S.–Saudi civilian nuclear agreement lacked the safeguards necessary “to prevent Saudi Arabia from weaponizing” American nuclear technology, reflecting a broader concern within his office over the administration’s willingness to bend national security and funding decisions to political ends.
The grant cancellations Beyer referenced Saturday are not an isolated episode. The Energy Department has separately conceded in two other federal cases that political considerations were a “primary reason” for grant terminations, cases in which U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ultimately ruled the agency had improperly canceled more than a dozen grants. The latest court filing, however, is described by officials involved in the litigation as far more sweeping and explicit than those earlier admissions.
The dispute carries added weight because the administration is currently finalizing new regulations, expected to be completed by October 2026, that would grant Trump-appointed political officials direct authority to review, block, or revoke more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants across the government. Critics, including antipoverty organizations, scientists, city leaders, and law enforcement officials, have flooded the federal government with comments warning the rule would formalize the kind of politically motivated targeting now documented in court. Vought has defended the proposal, telling lawmakers at a congressional hearing this month that it would ensure “that we have democratic control of the spending that is going out.”
Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who previously served in the Biden administration, said the court filing should be read as a warning about how far the administration may be willing to go once the new rule takes effect. “The risk that the Trump administration is willing to go to extreme lengths to politicize grant-making is not a hypothetical,” O’Connor said, adding that if officials “are willing to be that blatant about it,” lawmakers “should take seriously” the implications of a framework that could extend that politicization across the entire federal government.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, whose state lost $583 million in canceled energy funding, has also publicly demanded the money be restored, arguing in a statement that Trump governs on behalf of the country as a whole rather than his political base. The White House has not issued a public response to Beyer’s Saturday post, and it did not respond to the New York Times’ original requests for comment on the grant cancellations.
Beyer has not indicated whether he plans further legislative or oversight action in response to the court filing, but his Saturday statement adds a senior House Democrat’s voice to a growing chorus of lawmakers arguing that the episode represents a direct test of whether constitutional limits on presidential power will hold as the administration moves to consolidate greater control over federal spending in the months ahead.