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If you expected today’s newsletter to be about Donald Trump’s threats to do a bunch of war crimes in Iran, or perhaps about the president’s petulant rant at the make-up White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, I can’t say I blame you. The former is a huge deal, and the latter is the sort of thing that Trump has successfully used for a decade to keep the conversation on his inane rhetoric rather than his policy failures. But today I want to focus on a story from Friday that would have been a massive scandal under any other administration. In our timeline, it got some pickup last week, but it’s already been largely forgotten.

The Trump administration canceled $7.5 billion in federal funding for clean energy projects in blue states, and it did so simply because those states had voted against Trump in the most recent election.

Wait, hold up. That’s a pretty big claim. How do you expect me to believe it?

Because the administration admitted it in court! In papers filed earlier this month (and highlighted Friday by a pair of New York Times reporters I really admire), the administration confessed to canceling Biden-era funding “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.”

What’s the backstory here?

In October, the Trump administration clawed back grants the Biden administration (with Congress’ approval) had allocated to support clean energy development. Trump’s team framed its “Actually, yeah, let’s cook the planet” agenda as a strike against wasting taxpayer dollars. That logic was already suspect, as it’s tough to claim that taxpayer dollars are being “wasted” on technologies aimed at keeping the planet suitable for human habitation. But beyond that, the framing was a lie: Barring one exception, the administration admitted in court, the funding was choked off only in states that had voted for Kamala Harris and had two Democratic senators. In red states, the cash continues to flow.

Why are they stating this so plainly in........

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