Mark Delaney: Michael, long week — did you see the AP story, the Matthew Daly piece, came out July 25th?
Michael C. Vincent: I did. And I've been sitting with the central contradiction ever since. Walk me through your read of it.
Mark Delaney: So here's what happened — the Department of Energy, in a federal court filing in a lawsuit called Thakur v. Trump, admitted — like, a DOE lawyer wrote this down — that 284 clean energy grants were canceled 'based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state.' Solely. That word is in there. And this covers the October terminations, $7.6 billion worth, 223 projects.
Michael C. Vincent: Now, picture it for a moment. That filing exists. It's in the record. And then —
Mark Delaney: And then the administration calls it a misrepresentation! Their own filing!
Michael C. Vincent: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is that Chris Wright is simultaneously out there saying these were bad projects, economically unviable, didn't serve national energy needs. That's a totally different defense. Those two positions can't occupy the same reality.
Mark Delaney: And Russell Vought didn't even bother with the economic argument, you know? He just posted on — uh, on X — that this was nearly eight billion dollars in 'Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.' That's not a merit-based argument. That's just saying the quiet part loud.
Michael C. Vincent: The University of California researchers who filed Thakur v. Trump may not have expected their lawsuit to produce this particular admission. And yet here it is — on the record, dated July 24th and 25th, 2026.
Mark Delaney: But wait — I keep getting stuck on this. The headline makes it sound like this is the first time they said it. It's not, right?
Michael C. Vincent: That's exactly what's new. A separate filing — late last year, before July 2026 — already confirmed that grant selection 'was influenced by whether a grantee's address was located in a State that tends to elect Democratic candidates.' Word for word. So this isn't a slip. It's the second time.
Mark Delaney: Wait — so they said it in court twice while denying it publicly both times?
Michael C. Vincent: That is the pattern. Now, here's the analogy I keep reaching for. Imagine you fire someone and you write in their HR file — formally, under oath — 'terminated because they live in the wrong neighborhood.' Then you hold a press conference and say it was performance. The file is the thing. The press conference is noise. That filing is the file.
Mark Delaney: Yeah, no — that's it. That's the click. And the July filing doesn't just say political identity was a factor, it says — uh, what was the exact language — 'no programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.' It rules out every other explanation.
Michael C. Vincent: The word 'solely' does the work. You see, the administration could have argued the political geography correlated with the economic problems. But 'solely' and 'no programmatic factor' — those are load-bearing words. They don't leave room for Chris Wright's economic-viability defense. Both cannot be true simultaneously.
Mark Delaney: Eh, but could they argue — I mean, can't they say the lawyer just phrased it badly? Like, that's not what we meant?
Michael C. Vincent: That's their move — calling it a misrepresentation. But this is the second filing saying the same thing. At some point 'bad phrasing' doesn't survive contact with 284 terminated grants, all but one in states that voted for Kamala Harris and had two Democratic senators. That's not a drafting error. That's a description.
Mark Delaney: But the thing I keep hearing — and I wanna push back on this — is people saying this was just Trump torching green energy because he hates climate stuff. Like, a blanket ideological sweep. And I get why that sounds right, but I don't think that's actually what the geography tells you.
Michael C. Vincent: Test it.
Mark Delaney: Okay — if you hate hydrogen on principle, if you hate battery tech on principle, you'd kill it everywhere, right? Red states, blue states, whatever. But 284 out of 284 grants land in Harris-voting, two-Democratic-senator states. One exception. One. That's not ideology. That's a targeting list. Donald Trump's 2024 electoral map is basically the — I mean, it's the document.
Michael C. Vincent: And the breadth of the projects actually makes that case sharper. Battery plants. Grid upgrades. Hydrogen technology. Carbon capture. That's not one program type. That's an entire ecosystem of different technologies with different politics, different constituencies.
Mark Delaney: That's — yeah, that's the part that got me. Because you'd expect, if it was anti-green, at least the hydrogen and carbon capture stuff survives, right? Those have Republican support. But they didn't survive. Because the projects weren't sorted by technology — they were sorted by zip code.
Michael C. Vincent: Picture the project manager. Midwest battery plant. Blue state. She got the green light in 2023, hired contractors, had equipment ordered. October comes — grant canceled. Forty people.
Mark Delaney: She doesn't know about Thakur v. Trump. She doesn't know what 'solely on the political identity of the recipient's state' means. She just knows forty people are about to lose jobs and the supply chain is asking her why the order disappeared.
Michael C. Vincent: And that's where the 'green energy ideology' framing actually does harm. It lets the administration hide a partisan targeting operation behind a policy disagreement.
Mark Delaney: And honestly — the part that comes later in this conversation is what worries me more. Because if the OMB's Uniform Guidance rewrite goes through, this isn't a one-time thing you can litigate. They're building the architecture to make it permanent, while the money is already gone.
Michael C. Vincent: And that's the architecture piece — because the OMB isn't cleaning this up. On May 29th, 2026, they issued a proposed rule to revise Uniform Guidance, 2 CFR Part 200. That's the regulatory framework that governs the entire lifecycle of a federal grant — from issuance through closeout. And the proposed change adds pre-issuance review by political appointees.
Mark Delaney: Wait — political appointees reviewing grants before they go out?
Michael C. Vincent: Before they go out. It's implementing Executive Order 14332. Now — Russell Vought's OMB, the same office that posted about 'Green New Scam funding' on social media, is the office writing this rule. That is not coincidence. That is the same hand.
Mark Delaney: Okay, I mean — so October was the proof of concept, and this is, uh, this is them trying to make it the default setting.
Michael C. Vincent: That's the read I can't escape. And here's what that means practically — if this rule is finalized before any court rules on the merits in Thakur v. Trump, the administration can argue it's operating under new regulatory authority. The October cuts become a template, not a violation.
Mark Delaney: Can courts actually — I mean, wait, no — the money's already gone, right? Like, what does a ruling even get you at that point?
Michael C. Vincent: Honestly? I'd be careful claiming courts have a clear path here. There's no final ruling on the merits yet — critics argue the cancellations violate appropriations law, equal protection, the Administrative Procedure Act — but none of those claims have been adjudicated. And the administration may simply outpace the legal timeline.
Mark Delaney: So picture a grants administrator at a community college — uh, say she's mid-application for an Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act award right now. The OMB rule isn't final. But she doesn't know if a political appointee is reading her proposal before it clears. Does she change what she writes?
Michael C. Vincent: That's the chilling effect, and it doesn't require the rule to be finalized to work. The uncertainty is the instrument. And that, you see, is what courts are least equipped to address — the behavior that changes before any ruling ever lands.
Mark Delaney: That's the thing I'm left holding, honestly. Thakur v. Trump is still live — no final ruling on the merits, not even close — and the $7.6 billion is already gone. Like, courts can't un-cancel a battery plant that's already been mothballed. And meanwhile the OMB is out there potentially finalizing a rule that would just... make this the normal way grants work. So the question isn't really whether what happened in October broke the law that existed in October. It's whether the law itself gets rewritten before anyone answers that first question.
Michael C. Vincent: You see, that's the one I don't have an answer to.
Mark Delaney: Yeah. Me neither. I don't think anyone does right now — and uh, I'm not sure that's gonna change fast. Thanks for working through this one with me.
Michael C. Vincent: It's the kind of story you want to have an ending for. We don't, not yet.
