Investigate Politicized Federal Funding Decisions by Executive Branch

I write to ask that Congress take concrete legislative action to prevent the executive branch from using federal funding as a political weapon. Three recent developments make this urgent. First, in the Department of Energy clean-energy grants program, the administration terminated 284 renewable energy and hydrogen hub grants in October 2025. In a court filing from July 2026 (Case 3:25-cv-04737-RFL, Northern District of California), the Department of Energy's own attorneys made explicit stipulations showing that with only one exception, all 284 terminated grants had recipients or places of performance in states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and have two Democratic senators. The remaining approximately 340 grants proposed for termination—all located in Republican-voting states—were not terminated. The Department of Energy stipulated that the inclusion of grants in the October termination was based "solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state" and was not based on any "programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor." Second, on July 21, 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is deferring approximately 867.5 million dollars in federal Medicaid payments to California and 199 million dollars to Minnesota pending a fraud review. However, this appears selective. Both states are governed by Democratic administrations and voted Democratic in the 2024 election, while similar Medicaid programs in other states have not faced comparable scrutiny or funding deferrals. Third, the Office of Management and Budget has proposed a new regulation (OMB-2026-0034, published in the Federal Register on May 29, 2026) that would expand agency authority to terminate federal awards not based on program performance but on subjective "Federal agency priorities" as determined by "politically accountable leadership." The regulation explicitly states that agencies may terminate awards if they "no longer effectuate program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest as they exist at the time of the termination." This language provides virtually unlimited discretion for political decision-making about fund distribution. These actions constitute,at the very least, misuse of appropriated funds on the part of the executive, for the following reasons: First, Congress, not the President, holds the power of the purse. Article I of the Constitution grants Congress authority to appropriate funds, and this power comes with an implicit duty to ensure it is spent for the purposes Congress authorized, not for political purposes Congress did not authorize. When Congress appropriates funds for Medicaid, disaster relief, or clean energy sure that monresearch, it defines the lawful purposes of those funds. The executive cannot rewrite those purposes based on the political alignment of grant recipients or states. Second, the Take Care Clause (Article II, Section 3) requires the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." The President should not use appropriated funds as a political lever by conditioning them on factors Congress never specified and did not authorize. Third, using federal funding as punishment for states based on their voting patterns inverts the constitutional principle of federalism. The Tenth Amendment in intended to protect state authority from federal coercion. The administrations actions subvert that principle. Grants may have conditions related to program purposes, but should not be used to punish states for their electoral choices or policy disagreements unrelated to the grant. As your constituent, I urge you to act in three ways: First, hold hearings and require testimony to determine the extent that Medicaid funding has been politicized by the current administration. The President has demonstrated by word and deed that his credibility is untrustworthy in general, and is not sufficient in this case when he says that is being done because of 'fraud'.