James' World 2

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When the 47th solar panel exploded, Henrik Eskilsson began to fear he’d signed on with a madman.

In his SUV, he and Anders Olsson were accelerating across Sweden’s Lunda Airfield, towing a trailer fitted with a steel mast that suspended the panel. As they gained speed, the panel did something unusual: it floated, catching the wind like a hang glider while staying anchored to the mast. The speedometer crept toward 100 kilometers per hour. Behind them, the device began vibrating. Suddenly, it snapped free, tumbled through the air, and shattered on the runway.

Eskilsson, who’d previously founded a company that makes eye-tracking software, stopped the car and contemplated why he’d committed to this quixotic project: to revolutionize solar power for more than half of the people living on Earth. Many areas in the Northern Hemisphere and some in the Southern lie in zones where traditional solar fields are inefficient, especially in winter—but also in the morning and evening. When the sun sits low, its rays hit horizontal panels at a shallow, grazing angle, delivering little energy. Vertical solar panels that track the sun even as it barely clears the tree line have proved too expensive, requiring multiple motors to rotate them, too much concrete to anchor them, and too much steel to keep the wind from tearing them apart.

The shattered prototype was part of Olsson and Eskilsson’s effort to solve this: Vaja, the vertical-tracking start-up they had co-founded in 2023. For years, Olsson had envisioned building solar systems that moved with the wind like leaves in a storm. He and Eskilsson had consulted with mechanical engineers, who said this design would be impossible. Olsson disagreed. Eskilsson trusted him, although he wondered how many more panels would first have to be destroyed.

They got out of the SUV, took brooms from the back and, in the brisk winter afternoon, began sweeping the runway.

Solar is the fastest-growing source of global electricity, accounting for 7 percent of the world’s generation in 2024, up from roughly 1 percent a decade earlier. In the 2010s, utility companies invested heavily in solar farms with fixed-tilt panels—stationary solar arrays oriented toward the equator to catch the sun’s light. Such systems produce the most electricity in the middle of the day. In markets with many solar farms, this is when electricity prices are lowest, making the panels less profitable. Then, as the sun goes down and electricity demand spikes, the panels cease to be productive.

Horizontal trackers address such limitations by following the sun. Mounted on a north-south spine, the panels tilt like a seesaw, turning east at dawn, lying flat at midday, and facing west at sunset. They can deliver up to 35 percent more energy than fixed-tilt systems for a modest bump in cost. Horizontal tracking has “basically exploded over the past 10 to 15 years,” Eskilsson says.

But horizontal trackers suffer from the same latitudinal shortcomings as fixed-tilt: travel north or south from the equator, and the benefits diminish. Between the 30th and 40th parallels north—roughly aligned with Houston and Philadelphia, respectively—the equation shifts to favor vertical trackers: systems designed to intercept the light of a low-hanging sun that would otherwise skim over a horizontal array.

A handful of companies offer static vertical panels. In Europe, Norway’s Over Easy Solar and Germany’s Next2Sun and SOLYCO Solar provide a variety of vertical solar panels that harvest morning, evening, and winter light. Making vertical trackers, which pivot around an upright axis like a revolving door, is far more challenging. All vertical panels catch the wind like sails. Stationary setups can be made to resist powerful gusts, but vertical trackers are more fragile because they are mobile and mounted on a single post. Imagine a heavy roadside sign perched on a pole: the wind doesn’t just push against the sign; it tries to twist the pole, too. Torsion around a vertical post is nastier than around a horizontal tracker’s low-slung backbone, leading more easily to broken panels and motors. Efforts at beefing them up priced them out of existence. “These kinds of vertical trackers, even today, cost like four times as much as horizontal trackers,” Eskilsson says. Developers in the north stuck with static systems, using more panels to make up for lost productivity.

Olsson, now 51 years old, became interested in solar in 2017, before it was common in his country. On a ski trip, he told a friend that Sweden didn’t receive enough sunlight for the technology to work. The friend disagreed and showed him the math. “I realized when I saw the numbers that solar does make sense,” Olsson says. The moment sparked his love for a challenge, and he spent the train ride home writing a business plan.

Soldags, Olsson’s first solar panel company, took off installing panels for consumers, usually on roofs. But two years in, he landed a contract to install panels on the ground, which required anchoring them with concrete blocks. “These things weighed 10 times more than the solar panels,” Olsson says. An engineering physicist by training and a recreational sailor, he knew how much torque wind could exert. Yet nature thrived in it—trees flexed, leaves feathered. Why did he have to burn money to hold panels still?

He shared his thoughts with his friend and fellow sailor Fredrik Lundell, a fluid dynamics professor and aerodynamics expert. As they spoke, they made sketches of a pivoting mount that might allow panels to feather in the wind.

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How to Combat Perfectionism

Since perfectionism is associated with negative outcomes, what can someone with perfectionist tendencies do to change their behavior? Although people are sometimes hesitant to give up their perfectionist tendencies, psychologists point out that giving up on perfection doesn’t mean being less successful. In fact, because mistakes are an important part of learning and growing, embracing imperfection can actually help us in the long run.

One possible alternative to perfectionism involves developing what psychologists call a growth mindset. Researchers at Stanford University have found that cultivating a growth mindset is a crucial way to help us learn from our failures. Unlike those with fixed mindsets (who see their skill levels as innate and unchangeable), those with growth mindsets believe they can improve their abilities by learning from their mistakes. Psychologists point out that parents can play a crucial role in helping their children develop healthier attitudes towards failure: they can praise their children for making an effort (even if their results were imperfect) and help children learn to persevere when they make mistakes.

Another potential alternative to perfectionism is to cultivate self-compassion. To understand self-compassion, think about how you would respond to a close friend if they made a mistake. Odds are, you’d probably respond with kindness and understanding, knowing that your friend meant well. The idea behind self-compassion is that we should treat ourselves kindly when we make mistakes, remind ourselves that mistakes are part of being human, and avoid being consumed by negative emotions. As Ruggeri points out for BBC Future, self-compassion can be beneficial for mental health, but perfectionists tend not to treat themselves in compassionate ways. If you’re interested in trying to foster more self-compassion, the researcher who developed the concept of self-compassion has a short exercise you can try.

Psychologists have also suggested that cognitive behavioral therapy can be a way to help people change their beliefs about perfectionism. Although perfectionism is linked to lower mental health, the good news is that perfectionism is something you can change. By working to see mistakes as learning opportunities, and replacing self-criticism with self-compassion, it’s possible to overcome perfectionism and develop a healthier way of setting goals for yourself.

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The instructions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents explain in clear terms how to defuse dangerous encounters: Use “minimal force” when trying to remove people from cars. Issue commands in “professional,” “firm,” “courteous” voices.

“First step in arresting an occupant of a vehicle is NOT to reach in and grab him, unless there are specific circumstances requiring that action,” reads one internal ICE document providing legal guidance for uses of force during vehicle stops. It was reviewed by The New York Times, along with other training materials. ICE officials will thoroughly investigate any encounter, but “deadly force” is allowed only when agents believe lives are in danger.

The fatal shooting of Renee Good last week by an ICE agent in Minneapolis — and the quick reaction by Trump administration officials to declare the agent a hero and Ms. Good a villain — has put a new focus on whether federal agents enforcing President Trump’s deportation drive have been properly prepared for confrontations on city streets. The response of Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants to the killing has also underscored how they have embraced what is supposed to be a last resort under the written standards: using lethal force in self-defense.

Rather than encourage agents to de-escalate combustible encounters, as the agency guidelines emphasize, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have provided tacit approval for more aggressive tactics.

Several weeks before the shooting, a top ICE official told officers to take “decisive action” if threatened. Immediately after, Mr. Trump and other administration officials said Ms. Good had tried to run the agent over, although a Times video analysis found that she appeared to have turned her vehicle away from him.

“That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” Vice President JD Vance said last week of the ICE agent who killed Ms. Good, 37. “He was doing his job.”

On Tuesday, the Homeland Security Department reiterated that sentiment to its agents, posting a clip on social media of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, saying, “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Tensions in Minneapolis have boiled over in the days since Ms. Good’s death. On Wednesday night, a federal agent in the city shot and wounded a man who was attacking him, officials said. The episode led to hours of clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said ICE agents were using appropriate tactics.

“The entire Trump administration stands behind our heroic ICE officers who are conducting themselves with the utmost professionalism and integrity, while making American communities safer,” Ms. Jackson said in a statement. “It is not an ‘aggressive tactic’ to defend yourself from an individual using their car as a deadly weapon — ICE officers have a right to self-defense.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman, said that “ICE law enforcement officers are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and our officers” and are “highly trained in de-escalation tactics.”

The Minneapolis shooting has also revealed the risks of Mr. Trump’s decision to send ICE on large-scale sweeps through cities, a move that has thrust agents into confrontations with hostile crowds. Most ICE agents are not trained to handle crowd control, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office. That is in part because ICE has historically focused on targeted arrests that attract less attention and rarely put its officers in conflict with the public.

Moreover, the agency is rapidly expanding its ranks, already more than doubling its number of law enforcement personnel, after an infusion of $75 billion in new funding over four years. It has expedited its training programs to accommodate the new recruits, including reducing training on how to handle vehicle stops, according to a former official at the federal government’s law enforcement academy who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal homeland security policies.

Ms. McLaughlin said there had been no reduction in training on vehicle stops.

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Newly recruited Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a training center last year. President Trump and administration officials have given tacit approval for more aggressive tactics by the agency.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York Times

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Of all the nonstop talk about artificial intelligence at CES this year, the most useful thing I heard came from Stevie Wonder.

I spotted him moving through the expo floor—handlers tight by his side, fans threading in and out—and sidled up long enough to ask a few questions. Wonder isn’t new to this world. He’s always treated technology as part of his craft—as something to be shaped, tested, and tuned. Long before AI became an unavoidable buzzword, he worked with synth pioneers on the sounds that defined songs like “Superstition” and “Living for the City.” He’s been attending CES for more than a decade.

Wonder is working on his first album in more than 20 years, so I asked what he made of AI in the creative process. He did not equivocate. “I will not let my music be programmed,” he told me. “I’m not going to use it to do me and do the music I’ve done.” He wasn’t rejecting technology. He was protecting what he considers human territory. “We can go on and on talking about technology,” he said. But he was concerned with a different question. “Let’s see how you make things better for people in their lives—not to emulate life but to make life better for the living.”

Among the health-tech exhibitors, a common theme emerged: the always-on AI companion, one that can help make care decisions, locate services, and navigate daily life. Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI, told me people already use Copilot and Bing to ask roughly 50 million health-related questions every day.

Yet the promise felt realest only in smaller tools with clearer stakes—especially the ones built for people who are blind or have limited vision. With accessibility tech, both the problem and the upside felt obvious.

After a few hours on the floor, a pattern emerged. Some of the most compelling accessibility tech didn’t try to fix vision so much as translate the visual world into something usable. EchoVision, a pair of smart glasses from California-based AGIGA—developed with input from Wonder—let a wearer point their head toward a sign, a doorway or another object and hear a description about it. In a hall full of gadgets that felt like solutions in search of problems, narration that eases a person’s day made good sense.

But description doesn’t always solve the full problem.

“I’m not so sure it does you much good to know that in this direction is where the restrooms are,” a representative from Seattle-based Glidance told me, “if you don’t already have the navigation skills to dodge all the people in the way.” The world isn’t just a picture frozen in time. It’s movement. It’s crowds. It’s columns, curbs, chaos.

Glidance’s answer was Glide, a two-wheeled device that would roll along in front of you with a grip attached, sort of like a handlebar on wheels. Stereo cameras spotted obstacles and hazards. The device then steered and braked to help keep you moving in the direction you wanted to go.

Glidance kept the guide in your hand; .lumen put it on your forehead. The Romanian start-up’s founder, Cornel Amariei, described his glasses as “a self-driving car that sits on your head.” At CES, the company won an accessibility award in a pitch competition for assistive-tech start-ups that came with an oversize $10,000 check. (“Now we have money for the return tickets,” Amariei said.)

Many CES demos relied on bulky sensor rigs. But .lumen kept the hardware of its glasses simple and tried to do the rest with software. Six cameras create stereoscopic vision—depth perception built from slightly different angles, the way two eyes triangulate a curb. And the team made a key design choice: the glasses don’t require an Internet connection. All the compute is in the device itself.

Amariei explained that geometry alone isn’t enough. A lake is perfectly flat. A system that only understands “flat” will steer you right into it. The harder part is recognizing safe surfaces from dangerous ones—then translating that into something your body can use. When .lumen’s glasses find a clear route, they don’t announce directions one step at a time. They guide you there with haptics, nudging your head toward the open path.

All the sensor talk and the demos were fascinating, but the human payoff is what has stayed with me. These tools aim to let someone move through a lobby, down a sidewalk, through a crowded hall, without having to stop and reassess every few feet.

The best accessibility tech I saw at CES pushed back against the show’s most annoying habit: making sweeping promises when what people need are reliable, specific tools. Some of these devices will cost a lot. Some will take longer to mature than their demos suggested. Some will stumble in the real world. But they point in a direction that Stevie Wonder would recognize: tools that make life better for the living.

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If hitting “submit” on yet another job application feels like you’re tossing your resume into a black hole, you’re not the only one feeling that way. A recent Glassdoor poll of over 2,500 U.S. professionals shows that more than 70% of workers don’t feel hopeful about their job search this year. That feeling stems from perceiving the process as beyond their control.  

Glassdoor’s analysis, released on Monday, shows that online applications still generate 66% of interviews and 60% of job offers, but their dominance has slipped as AI and easier application tools have flooded employers with candidates.

At the same time, interviews initiated through referrals are 35% more likely to result in an offer, and recruiter-sourced candidates now represent a growing share of hires. About 40% of offers come from human connection through referrals, recruiters, and in-person applications. 

“The job search used to be a reliable numbers game, with more applications translating to more interviews and offers,” Chris Martin, Glassdoor’s lead researcher, said in a statement. “As hiring rates have fallen over the past two years, however, many job-seekers are struggling to make progress even after hundreds of applications.”Glassdoor’s new report shows that the problem is less about effort and more about where to direct that effort. The report found five concrete strategies that tap into the hidden 40% of job offers that did not start with an online application. 

1. Formulate a 20-company list

Instead of blanketing the market with applications, the report recommends identifying about 20 target employers and following them on social media. In addition, write thoughtful comments under each company’s social media posts and set up job alerts for these firms. 

2. Showcase your expertise online

Glassdoor’s experts emphasize that your online footprint can now be a direct path around traditional gatekeepers. They recommend consistently posting professional content in an area of expertise to promote a visible online presence. 

3. Consider networking as a research project

The report identified another strategy as reframing networking. Instead of looking at it as a direct job ask, consider it a research project and schedule conversations to learn more about how others are navigating the market. These discussions often surface opportunities that never make it to job boards. 

4. Become more visible

Deliberately connect with people inside target companies so that your name feels more familiar when your application appears. This tactic prioritizes visibility over volume of applications. 

5. Tap into casual connections

Finally, the report emphasized the surprising power of casual connections — your “weak ties.” Glassdoor community members note that friends of friends and old coworkers have often been more effective at opening doors than close contacts, especially for employee referrals. 

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Opal Lee and her family never returned to their Fort Worth home after a white mob forced them to flee 85 years ago. Today, with the help of community members Opal owns the land and a brand new home.

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Juneteenth

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The testimony, part of the derailed Georgia election interference case, makes clear how dismissive some senior Republicans were of claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina found President Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020 “unnerving.” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia described Mr. Trump’s efforts to get his state’s lawmakers to intervene a “fruitless exercise.” David Ralston, a former speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, called the plan to create slates of fake pro-Trump electors in states he had lost “the craziest thing I’ve heard.”

Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies, obtained this week by The New York Times, show just how alarmed and exasperated a number of senior Republicans felt about the president’s efforts to overturn an American presidential election. The testimony, given in 2022, is emerging at a time when Mr. Trump is again raising complaints about his 2020 defeat and voicing regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election.

He has also said he wanted to “lead a movement” to ban voting machines and mail-in ballots in time for the midterm elections this year.

The transcripts were part of the investigative file in the case brought by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who obtained indictments of Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies on election interference charges in 2023. The case was dismissed in November after Ms. Willis was removed from prosecuting the case.

The interviews were conducted by a special purpose grand jury that was convened in Atlanta as part of Ms. Willis’s investigation. In Georgia, these kinds of grand juries are somewhat rare. Unlike ordinary grand juries, the special-purpose kind do not issue indictments; rather, they allow prosecutors to present everyday citizens with testimony and documents and receive recommendations before seeking an indictment. In this case, the special-purpose grand jury recommended indicting more than twice as many Trump allies as Ms. Willis eventually charged.

The skepticism that some of Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans expressed in their testimony about his claims is probably something that Georgia prosecutors would have emphasized to a trial jury if their case against Mr. Trump had not been derailed.

Senator Graham, the veteran South Carolina lawmaker, recently called Mr. Trump “the greatest president of all time.” But his 2022 testimony came at a time when Mr. Trump’s political future was uncertain. At that time, Mr. Graham expressed exasperation over the president’s baseless 2020 election fraud claims, telling the grand jurors, “I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short,” and that “if you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”

He called the Trump campaign’s plan to enlist fake electors in swing states where the president had lost the election “weird — I don’t know what to tell you, just weird.” He attributed Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in Arizona not to fraud, as Mr. Trump and his allies claimed, but rather to Mr. Trump’s bashing of the state’s longtime senator, John McCain. And he said that weakness with suburban voters had hurt Mr. Trump in a number of swing states.

“The McCain effect in Arizona was real,” Senator Graham told the grand jurors. “And when you look through the suburbs in the states in question, you sort of had a common pattern where President Trump ran behind other Republicans. I was trying to convey that to him.”

“I’m sorry he lost,” Mr. Graham added. “But he lost it.”

Mr. Ralston, the powerful Georgia House speaker from 2010 through 2022, testified a few months before his death. In December, The Times obtained and released a recording of a call Mr. Trump made to Mr. Ralston in late 2020, urging him to call a special session of the state legislature to overturn Georgia’s election results.

Mr. Ralston recounted the call in his testimony, saying that “right off the bat, I’ve got to tell him I disagree with him.”

In addition to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Ralston, some other details from the grand jury testimony have previously been reported by The Times and other news outlets, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as in books like “Find Me the Votes,” by the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman.

The Times obtained the transcripts after the judge who presided over the Georgia case, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, lifted an order that had barred defense lawyers from disclosing much of the material they had received as part of the discovery process.

Mr. Kemp, now in his final year as governor because of term limits, became known for refusing to bend to Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. In his testimony before the special grand jury, he said Mr. Trump urged him to convene a special legislative session, and to order an audit of ballot signatures.

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Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony indicate that President Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election exasperated and alarmed a number of senior Republicans. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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Greenland sharks are a biological anomaly. The animals can grow to more than 20 feet long, weigh more than a ton and can live for nearly 400 years, making the species the longest-living vertebrate on the planet—a fact that could help unlock secrets to enhancing longevity.

And now, in a study published this week in Nature Communications, scientists dial in to one of the Greenland shark’s more remarkable features: it has functioning eyes and, more remarkably, maintains its vision well into senescence.

Biologists have long believed these sharks to be practically blind, in part because of their tendency to attract parasites that attack and lodge themselves inside the sharks’ corneas. But this work challenges that belief, the researchers write, showing that even centuries-old Greenland sharks retain a visual system “well-adapted for life in dim light.”

“Evolutionarily speaking, you don’t keep the organ that you don’t need,” said Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of the paper, in a statement. “After watching many videos, I realized this animal is moving its eyeball toward the light.”

Skowronska-Krawczyk and her colleagues analyzed samples taken from sharks that were more than a century old and found no obvious signs of retinal degeneration, which, she notes, is a “remarkable” finding, considering their advanced age.

The researchers say the work offers a jumping off point for future research into how the sharks preserve their vision over such long periods of time, work that could eventually inform studies of age-related vision loss in humans—and how it might be prevented.

“Not a lot of people are working on sharks, especially shark vision,” said Emily Tom, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Irvine, who is also a co-author of the study, in the same statement.

“We can learn so much about vision and longevity from long-lived species like the Greenland shark,” Tom said.

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A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration’s cancellation of approximately $8 billion in energy grants violated the Constitution by targeting recipients primarily based in Democratic-leaning states.

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta issued a 17-page opinion finding the Department of Energy’s (DOE) grant terminations unlawful under the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. The ruling orders the department to restore seven specific grants worth $27.6 million that were part of a broader cancellation affecting more than 200 projects announced by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought on October 1, 2025, the first day of the government shutdown.

Newsweek reached out to the White House and OMB via email on Monday for comment.

Why It Matters

Mehta concluded that “all the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.” The ruling establishes constitutional boundaries on executive branch actions that discriminate based on state political affiliation.

According to NOTUS, the DOE’s decision targeted grantees based in blue states while red-state-based groups using federal funding for similar projects largely avoided termination, creating a pattern of disparate treatment across hundreds of projects nationwide.

What To Know

The DOE terminated grants following Vought’s October 1 announcement on X stating that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” He listed 16 states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington—none of which voted for Trump in 2024.

The next day, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had met with Vought to “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut” during the shutdown.

The termination letters were initially sent without formal DOE letterhead and informed recipients their awards are “not consistent with this Administration’s goals, policies and priorities.” A week later, identical letters were sent on official agency letterhead. The grants supported environmental projects including electric vehicle development, updated building energy codes, and methane emissions reduction.

According to NOTUS, the administration canceled $460 million for Minnesota transmission lines while preserving $700 million for similar Montana projects, and cut Hawaii wildfire resilience funding while maintaining $160 million for Georgia Power’s grid resilience work. Of 17 battery recycling projects, only three were cut—all in blue states—while the remaining 14 in red states or at national labs continued, NOTUS reported. The disparate treatment extended to multi-state programs: for the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnership program, “only projects in states that voted for Vice President Harris were cancelled on October 2, 2025, while similar projects in states that voted for President Trump were not.”

The city of St. Paul, Minnesota, and environmental groups including Interstate Renewable Energy Council, Plug In America, ElevateEnergy, Southeast Community Organization, and Environmental Defense Fund filed suit. The DOE defended its decision by claiming it advanced Trump administration energy priorities.

However, Mehta found “no plausible rational connection” between the administration’s stated energy goals and selectively canceling blue-state grants. The court emphasized that defendants conceded Plaintiffs’ seven terminated grants are “comparable” to awards to grantees in red states that were not terminated, with the only identifiable difference being “the grant recipient’s state’s political identity.”

The defendants stipulated that “a primary reason for the selection of which DOE grant termination decisions were included in the October 2025 notice tranche was whether the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State.'” The court rejected the DOE’s argument that the Fifth Amendment does not apply to federal funding decisions, stating: “There’s no federal funding exception to the Equal Protection Clause.”

What People Are Saying

Judge Amit P. Mehta said in the ruling: “There is no reason to believe that terminating an award to a recipient located in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Democratic candidates—and, particularly, voted against President Trump—furthers the agency’s energy priorities any more than terminating a similar grant of a recipient in a state whose citizens tend to vote for Republican candidates or voted for President Trump.”

Mehta emphasized the narrowness of his ruling: “By no means does the court conclude that the mere presence of political considerations in an agency action runs afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said October 2025, per NOTUS when asked why affected projects were in states that voted for presidential nominee Kamala Harris, Wright denied targeting Democrats and said: “More project announcements will come,” including in red states.

What Happens Next

The DOE must restore the seven grants specified in the ruling, however the administration could appeal Mehta’s decision to a higher court.

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President Donald Trump listens as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought speaks during an event at the White House on October 9, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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Hmmmm … Be sure to follow Josiah, he has a lot of musical content you will enjoy! 

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Josiah Wade

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