U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Gov. Ned Lamont complained Friday that the Trump administration has yet to release federal energy grants terminated a year ago on the basis of whether the recipients were in states won by Kamala Harris in 2024 and are represented by Democratic senators.
“It’s illogical, illegal, intolerable — and that’s in effect what the court found. The district court in the District of Columbia held that this cancelation of grants was in fact illegal, but the administration has not yet provided them,” Blumenthal said at a press conference in Hartford.
In stipulated judgments issued in January and June on cases challenging the termination a year ago of $7.6 billion in clean energy grants, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded the administration had acted illegally. While applying only to a portion of the grants, the decisions addressed motivation for all the cancellations.
One dozen of the 284 terminated grants were slated for eight recipients in Connecticut, including the University of Connecticut and RTX, the corporate parent of Pratt & Whitney. RTX was the recipient of four of the 12 grants. Blumenthal said the grants owed to Connecticut recipients was $53 million.
The complaint voiced Friday was not new but rather an update on a standoff that persists despite the two court decisions and lobbying by senators.
Blumenthal was one of 37 senators to sign a letter on July 30 urging Energy Secretary Chris Wright to release grants awarded by the Biden administration and blocked at the instigation of federal budget director Russell Vought, who boasted on social media that “the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled.”
The senator said Mehta’s conclusions have been ignored, not challenged.
“There’s no excuse for this administration disobeying the law and withholding this funding,” Blumenthal said.
“It’s amazing how brazen the Trump administration is — ‘We’re cutting off this basic research funding because we don’t like you, and you’re from a blue state,’” Lamont said.
Mehta, who sits on the U.S. District Court in Washington, ruled in June on a case brought by a coalition of plaintiffs led by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The decision in June specifically applied to at least some of the Connecticut grantees.
Lawyers for the administration signed off on stipulations in two cases before Mehta and another in northern California in which they concede blue state recipients had been targeted. They initially defended it as a move to protect taxpayers against wasteful spending.
“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” the stipulation stated. With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a had a connection to “a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators.”
The stipulation was first reported by the New York Times.
But a DOE spokesperson said in a statement Friday, “None of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.”
Blumenthal and Lamont spoke Friday at a press conference with Emma Cimino, the acting state commissioner of energy and environmental protection, and Rep. Jaime Foster, D-Ellington, a scientist and member of the legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee.
“It is a frustrating time to be a leader in the energy policy space and to be a research scientist,” Foster said. “It is very clear that the way that we do research and development in this country is heavily reliant on federal investment, and when there is uncertainty in the way to fund future research, research teams lose really important time in developing their teams’ processes as they move forward.”
Cimino said Connecticut is particularly sensitive to the federal action.
“We’re at the forefront of research and development on emerging technologies, with many of the amazing companies located in our state, the elite universities doing a lot of this research,” Cimino said. “And these actions by the Trump administration hurt those companies. They hurt our researchers, and they don’t position us for success amid a constantly and rapidly changing energy landscape.”
The Department of Energy did not answer specific questions about the status of the 12 Connecticut grants.
Besides UConn and RTX, the other grant recipients in Connecticut are Karpman Consulting, Proton Energy Systems, FuelCell Energy, Mott Corporation, Linde PLC and Calcify.
The $10 million grant to the Mott Corporation, based in Farmington, was for the development of titanium parts used in fuel cells. UConn and an Wallingford company, Nel Hydrogen, also was involved, according to a DOE document.
RTX was the recipient for four of grants totaling more than $14 million to help develop advanced combustion turbines, as well as composite tanks for the storage of liquid hydrogen.
Linde PLC, the German gas and engineering company, had been awarded $9.5 million to develop a hydrogen refueling station for heavy-duty trucks. That work was to take place at the company’s facilities in Danbury, Oklahoma and Texas, according to project documents.
The University of Connecticut was to receive $2.25 million.
Unclear was whether the recipients had received partial payments before the cutoff ordered in October, nine months after Trump returned to the White House and put Vought in charge of the Office of Management and Budget.
Blumenthal said he hoped Republican senators would help bring pressure on the administration for a resolution.
“The idea that the administration is continuing to disobey the court and illegally withhold these funds should be abhorrent to Republicans as well as Democrats, because what goes around comes around,” he said. “They ought to be as fearful of political retribution when it comes to blue states as it would be to red states if Democrats were doing this kind of illegal action.”
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
