California Gov. Gavin Newsom used a Friday afternoon post on X to accuse the Trump administration of a “corrupt” scheme to strip federal funding from states based on their voting patterns, framing the admission as further evidence that the White House is governing less like a democracy and more like the authoritarian regimes he has repeatedly compared President Donald Trump to over the past year. The post, published to Newsom’s official X account at 3:49 p.m. on July 24, 2026, came hours after new court filings revealed that federal officials had confirmed under oath that billions of dollars in energy grants were canceled “based solely” on how states voted in the 2024 presidential election.
Newsom’s post read in full: “The corrupt Trump administration has just admitted to withholding taxpayer dollars from states based on how they voted. Last I checked we were a democracy, not a dictatorship. Where the hell is Congress?”
The Court Filing That Sparked the Outburst
The governor’s statement follows reporting confirming that the Department of Energy had conceded in federal court that it terminated 284 Biden-era clean energy grants worth roughly $7.5 billion in October 2025 without any regard for program performance, cost, or statutory compliance. A government attorney acknowledged in a filing that, with a single exception, every one of the terminated grants had a recipient or project location in a state that had backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and was represented by two Democratic-caucusing senators. The department’s own lawyers went further, stating outright that none of the 284 grants were included in the cancellations “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”
The admission stands in stark contrast to how the administration originally sold the cuts. When the cancellations were first announced last October, officials framed them as a necessary correction to protect taxpayers from wasteful Biden-era climate spending. Russell T. Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote on social media at the time that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled.” The newly disclosed court documents indicate there was little else driving the decision beyond the recipient state’s political leanings.
A Pattern That Kept Republican-Leaning States Untouched
According to the government’s own filings, hundreds of additional energy grants that the Energy Department had internally recommended for termination were left fully funded because they were located in states that had voted for Trump. Of roughly 624 grants the department initially flagged for possible cancellation, only 284 were ultimately terminated — and all but one sat in states that went for Harris. The projects affected included electrical grid upgrades in California and Oregon, methane-leak reduction efforts in Colorado, and clean hydrogen production hubs spanning California and the Pacific Northwest, several of which have since become the subject of separate litigation from affected grant recipients.
Energy Secretary’s Testimony Undercut
The court filings also appeared to directly contradict sworn congressional testimony from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who told a House hearing in June that “no decisions were made on politics” regarding the grant cancellations. Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, disputed any inconsistency, telling reporters that Wright had been drawing a distinction between the department’s original review process and the later timing of the cancellation announcements. “There is no contradiction, and any suggestion of a contradiction is a misrepresentation of the court filing,” Dietderich said. A department spokesperson separately maintained that “none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.”
Democrats in Congress Respond
The disclosure drew swift condemnation from congressional Democrats. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, the ranking Democrat on the House’s energy appropriations panel, issued a joint statement calling the funding cuts “outright un-American.” They wrote that “this administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: It terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election,” adding that it amounted to “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.”
Not an Isolated Incident, Advocates Say
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 episode should be read as a warning about how far the administration is willing to go in politicizing federal spending more broadly. “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 they are willing to be that blatant about it, then I think we should take seriously when they put forward a framework that would allow for the extreme politicization of grant-making across all of the federal government.” The Trump administration is currently finalizing new regulations, expected to be completed by October, that would give political appointees direct authority to review and block more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants across every agency, along with new restrictions barring recipients from activities or statements deemed “anti-American.”
A Legal Fight California Has Already Won Once
This is not the first time a federal court has weighed in on the funding fight. In April 2026, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that the Department of Energy had agreed to drop its appeal of a court order that struck down a separate policy capping reimbursements for state energy programs, calling it “a clear legal victory” for states. “The Trump Administration is finally recognizing what my office has said all along: approved energy funding isn’t up for grabs,” Bonta said in a statement posted to the California Department of Justice’s website. Just days before Newsom’s Friday post, a federal judge went further, ruling that the administration’s cancellation of the $7.6 billion in clean energy grants across 16 Harris-voting states was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote that “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,” finding the administration had offered no legitimate justification for the targeting and had violated the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees.
Part of a Broader Pattern of Funding Threats Against California
Friday’s post is the latest entry in a monthslong string of funding disputes between Sacramento and Washington. Earlier in July, the Trump administration froze more than $867 million in Medicare and Medicaid-related funding to California, with Newsom’s press office calling it a “recycled political stunt” and insisting “we are being targeted for political reasons.” In January, the administration moved to freeze child care and family assistance funding — including California’s CalWORKS program — for California alongside Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, all Democratic-led states, with an HHS spokesperson claiming the freeze was about rooting out “fraud.” Newsom has separately warned that Californians “pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back” from the federal government and floated withholding the state’s contribution altogether if the funding threats continued.
Newsom Has Long Accused Trump of Authoritarian Drift
Friday’s “democracy, not a dictatorship” framing fits a pattern Newsom has returned to repeatedly over the past year. During a primetime address in June 2025 after Trump deployed nearly 5,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles amid immigration enforcement protests, Newsom told Californians that “what we’re witnessing is not law enforcement, it’s authoritarianism,” comparing Trump to “other failed dictators” and declaring that “democracy is under assault right before our eyes. The moment we’ve feared has arrived.” In his final State of the State address in January 2026, Newsom again described Trump as an autocrat undermining democratic norms while touting California’s independent path. Newsom has also taken legislative action tied to the theme, signing a bill in June that imposes a 100% state tax on any Californian who benefits from a Trump-linked fund tied to individuals convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack, saying at the time that “taxpayer dollars should support victims, not the people who attacked law enforcement officers and our very democracy.”
The Broader Stakes for Federal Grant-Making
Critics warn the fight over the 284 energy grants is a preview of a much larger structural shift. The administration’s forthcoming grant-making regulations would require political appointees to sign off on federal funding decisions across agencies including education, health, housing and infrastructure, with the power to revoke money that does not align with the administration’s stated priorities. Testifying before Congress this month, Vought defended the approach, telling lawmakers it would ensure “that we have democratic control of the spending that is going out.” The proposed rules have drawn thousands of public comments in opposition from antipoverty organizations, arts groups, city officials, law enforcement leaders and scientists, who argue the changes would let the White House hold federal aid hostage to political loyalty on a nationwide scale.
What Comes Next
The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the court filing or on Newsom’s post. With the Energy Department disputing that politics drove its decisions even as its own attorneys told a federal judge otherwise, and with new grant-control regulations due before October, the fight over the 284 canceled grants is likely to remain a flashpoint heading into the fall — one that Newsom, widely viewed as weighing a 2028 presidential run, has shown no sign of letting go quiet. His Friday question — “Where the hell is Congress?” — was left unanswered by lawmakers on Capitol Hill as of Friday evening.