Russell Vought plainly got a sadistic thrill while announcing Wednesday that as part of the government shutdown battle, he will inflict punitive spending cuts on states that voted against Donald Trump in 2024. The Office of Management and Budget chief, a shadowy and powerful figure lurking behind the despot’s throne, declared that he is canceling $18 billion in infrastructure projects in New York and another $8 billion in green energy projects in 18 states that Kamala Harris won.
The “left’s agenda” is being “cancelled,” Vought tweeted with drunk-on-power rapture. Gosh, how exciting! Once again, the invincible President Trump is totally owning his enemies!
Not all Republicans are laughing, however. In a little-noticed move, GOP Representative Mike Lawler admitted in an exchange with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that some of these cuts will hurt his New York district north of the city. Here’s the key bit, via the indefatigable Aaron Rupar:
LAWLER: [Democrats] are playing pure politics here and it has to stop.
COLLINS: But do you not believe the administration is playing politics by only canceling projects in states where Democrats are running the place?
LAWLER: Listen, I’m in New York and I’m a Republican. And obviously this project cancellation impacts me, and it impacts my district. So it’s not just Democrats getting impacted.
Note that Lawler thinks he’s cleverly rebutting the notion that Trump is corruptly targeting his cuts at Democratic states. As a vulnerable incumbent in the 2026 midterms, the congressman needs to appear above such sordid abuses of power. But Lawler, whose district has a lot of Trump voters in it, is actually confirming something important: An untold number of Republicans will be negatively impacted by Vought’s sick little power trip.
Lawler appears to be referring to Trump’s cancellation of $18 billion for New York infrastructure projects, including new train tunnels being built under the Hudson River. Those are expected to carry economic and other benefits for the entire region. (New York is also being targeted for canceled green energy facilities.) This is the thing about infrastructure projects: If they get canceled in blue states, everyone in them who stood to benefit loses out, not just the people in them who voted for Kamala Harris. Funny how that works.
The same goes for all those green energy projects that Vought is excitedly canceling. It’s hard to gauge exactly who will be hurt by all these cancellations, because in a weird twist, the administration is being puzzlingly vague about them. After Vought’s tweets, the Energy Department announced the termination of 321 grants supporting 223 projects. But according to The New York Times, neither the department nor the White House is responding to requests for specifics.
There are around a half dozen vulnerable House Republicans in the states where Vought is canceling green energy projects. Will any of these be in their districts? We won’t know until a detailed list emerges, but it’s certainly possible. And who knows how many rank-and-file Republicans will lose jobs from those cancellations, or get hurt by their ripple effects?
More evidence of this dynamic is slowly dribbling out too. Bloomberg reports that among the $8 billion in canceled green energy projects are a number of hydrogen hubs, which are designed to facilitate development of clean power by creating networks of producers and consumers of hydrogen, sometimes spanning numerous states. Among the funding on the chopping block, per Bloomberg, is $1 billion for the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub.
Well, guess what? It turns out that the latter project spans Washington, Oregon, and Montana, a state that voted pretty overwhelmingly for Trump. Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, has hailed the project as a boon to his state, declaring that it will create “good-paying Montana jobs” and allow the state to be a “leader in energy innovation.”
If Bloomberg’s report is correct, and this does end up getting canceled, that’s quite a way to own the libs.
What all this really reveals is the folly and ugliness of placing own-the-libs sadism at the core of one’s political and governing strategy. The brazen corruption of this threat to cancel projects only in blue states, of course, is the point. MAGA Republicans are meant to thrill to the spectacle of Trump wielding this tactic to inflict pain only on blue America, and more importantly, to his open flaunting of the explicit, targeted nature of it all.
Trump grasps the appeal of this to his supporters perfectly well. He tweeted that by entering into the shutdown standoff, Democrats have given him the “opportunity” to cut “Democrat Agencies,” which is apparently supposed to mean he can unilaterally cancel congressionally appropriate funds by fiat to hurt his opponents in whatever way he wishes. He’s wielding absolute mastery over his enemies once again! They are quaking helplessly before his mighty wrath and limitless power!
But this will blow back on Republican politicians too. In New Jersey, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill is already pillorying her GOP opponent over Trump’s threat to defund the Hudson River tunnel project. He’ll struggle to defend the specter of lost jobs and snarled commutes. Lawler has declared it is negatively impacting him, and the same may happen with a handful of other House GOP incumbents. On top of all that, this sadistic little game is also going to hurt real, live human beings. And some of them are likely to turn out to be GOP and Trump voters.
