​Trump's budget chief brazenly broke the law to punish blue states: judge

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has found that President Donald Trump's top budget official violated the Constitution by terminating environmental grants during the federal government shutdown, but exclusively to states that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Judge Amit Mehta issued the ruling on Monday, siding with a group of companies and organizations that were awarded these grants before having them terminated by Trump's Department of Energy. Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought had framed these cuts as a cost-cutting measure during the shutdown, but as the ruling noted, Vought and Trump also "posted on social media about canceling funding that aligned with Democratic Party priorities."

The Trump administration argued that the Fifth Amendment's implicit guarantee of equal protection does not apply in this situation, and that there is precedent for their actions in XP Vehicles v. Department of Energy, a case in which the Barack Obama administration's Energy Department denied a loan guarantee to a vehicle battery company for not paying the application fee.

Mehta systematically dismantled these arguments.

In XP Vehicles, he noted, "the court found that the agency had articulated a rational basis for denying the plaintiff’s loan application under the terms of the governing statute ... Here, there is no rational basis to begin with. And this is not a case of mere pretext. Defendants transparently admit that a primary reason for their grant-termination decisions was the grantees’ location in Blue States."

As for the claim that the Fifth Amendment does not apply, Mehta quoted a concurrence by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in the landmark 2023 ruling that severely limited how colleges and universities can consider race in admission: “The Equal Protection Clause addresses all manner of distinctions between persons.”

This comes at the same time as Trump is pushing a number of other aggressive actions against Democratic-voting states, from surging immigration enforcement to their cities, to terminating their federal child care funding.