By David A. Graham
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
In a court filing earlier this month, a government lawyer
did something radical: He laid out the truth in plain English.
The surprise was not just the honesty from a chronically
dishonest administration but also the substance: The Trump administration
admitted that it had withheld federal money in retaliation against its
political rivals. The disclosure, first reported
by The New York Times on Friday, is part of a lawsuit from a
group of researchers in California whose grants were canceled. In lieu of
turning over documents to the plaintiffs in discovery, an Energy Department
attorney acknowledged in a filing
that decisions about which grants might be terminated had been “based solely”
on a goal of political retribution. “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 (‘Blue State’ grants),” the filing
stated, contradicting previous public statements by officials.
Every administration has its own policy agenda and
preferences, but this goes beyond that, subjugating science to partisanship and
holding research and infrastructure money hostage throughout much of the
country. If the United States is to remain legally and civically coherent—and
scientifically dynamic—the rules have to apply consistently.
Even before Donald Trump returned to office, the country
was in some ways pulling apart into two different policy worlds: one governed
by Democrats and one by Republicans, as the journalist Ronald Brownstein wrote
in The Atlantic in 2022. This was being driven largely by decisions
at the state level, producing widely varying economic, health, and social
outcomes. Trump is now using the power of the federal government to drive the
two sections further apart, a glaring act of division as the nation celebrates
its 250th anniversary. (Punishing states that lean Democratic also punishes
many Republican voters. More Californians cast a ballot for Trump in 2024 than
voters in Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee did combined.)
In some ways, the retaliation acknowledged in the suit is
in step with other Trump-administration actions. Trump is not coy about his
desire for political retribution, especially against high-profile critics, or
his sense that he is president to only those who voted for him. This is not his
first example of using federal funds to reward red states while punishing blue
ones. Earlier this year, Politico
calculated that in his first 14 months in office, Trump approved 89
percent of requests for disaster assistance from GOP-led states but just 23
percent of those from Democrat-led states. Yet when asked about the disparity,
the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied any political motive,
saying, “There is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster
aid.”
Jackson faced no legal penalty for such an obvious
falsehood—which is one reason courts remain a vital bulwark against Trump’s
abuse of power. I wrote
during Trump’s first presidency that many depositions demonstrated a huge gulf
between the president’s public bluster and balderdash and his meeker, franker
statements made when under oath. The same has been true of attorneys
representing his second administration. In several high-profile cases, they
have been forced to admit in court that public claims by officials were false.
Last year, for example, the official White House line was that Kilmar
Abrego Garcia was a dangerous MS-13 gang member who had been rightly
shipped to a Salvadoran prison. In court, however, lawyers acknowledged that
his deportation had been the result of an “administrative error.”
This past spring, charges against a group of people
arrested at a protest near Chicago fell apart after federal prosecutors
conceded a series
of major mistakes to a judge: They impermissibly vouched personally for the
credibility of evidence before a grand jury, spoke with grand jurors outside a
courtroom, and, after failing to obtain an indictment, excused grand jurors
who’d voted against charges and tried again. They then redacted transcripts to
try to hide this from the judge. And last week, the Department of Justice
dropped subpoenas issued to Times reporters after prosecutors admitted
to a judge that they had not followed either DOJ policy or court precedent by
not exhausting other options first.
(In some other instances, a related but inverted dynamic
has emerged in which it’s not court statements that contradict the public ones,
but the other way around: Government lawyers attempt to argue that
administration decisions were made deliberately and without regard to politics,
only for judges to point
to public statements by the president that appear to reveal the true,
improper motivations for the actions.)
Statements by government lawyers that contradict the
official White House line are not merely the results of pangs of conscience.
Attorneys understand that they can face sanctions, including disbarment, for
lying in court. Earlier this month, a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit that
produced Trump’s $1.8
billion slush fund for political allies blasted Acting Attorney General
Todd Blanche for testimony that was “at best, misleading and, at worst,
disingenuous.” She also referred Blanche, who faces a confirmation vote on his
elevation to permanent status, to the New York State Bar Association.
An Energy Department filing could put Energy Secretary
Chris Wright in a tight spot too. Last month, he told a House panel, “No
decisions were made on politics.” The Times reported that, according to
a department spokesperson, Wright had been “making a distinction between that
review process and the timing of when certain cancellations were announced.”
Was he trying to mislead, or was he himself kept in the dark, and which would
be more troubling? Trump sees his time in office as a chance to settle
political scores, and aides who pretend otherwise risk making themselves look
like fools—or worse.
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