The Trump administration is pulling $1.5 billion in health and transportation funding from Colorado, Illinois, California, and Minnesota — a decisive move to claw back taxpayer money that had been earmarked for electric vehicle chargers and CDC programs the administration considers too ideologically driven to justify.
The White House Office of Management and Budget directed the Transportation Department to rescind $943 million and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to rescind $602 million across the four states. An OMB spokesperson confirmed the action on Thursday, according to The Hill.
The transportation funds were slated mostly for electric vehicle chargers. The CDC funds targeted programs the administration feels are too "woke." Together, they represent a $1.5 billion correction — and a signal that Washington's days of writing blank checks to progressive pet projects may be numbered.
Look at where this money was headed, and you begin to understand why the administration acted.
On the transportation side, the specific line items tell the story:
Notice the pattern. Every single EV charger grant carries the unmistakable fingerprint of equity-first policymaking — not energy policy, not infrastructure investment, but social engineering dressed up in kilowatt-hours. The federal government wasn't funding a national charging network to serve American drivers. It was subsidizing chargers in politically selected zip codes, in politically selected states, to advance a politically selected vision of who deserves to drive electric.
And those listed items account for roughly $135 million of the $943 million total in transportation rescissions. The remainder of the funds have not been publicly itemized, but the theme is clear enough from the sample.
The health-side rescissions deserve even closer scrutiny. The CDC — an agency whose stated mission is protecting public health — had allocated funds for programs that read less like epidemiology and more like faculty lounge wish lists:
Some of these programs touch real public health concerns. HIV prevention matters. Intimate-partner violence matters. But the framing tells you everything. These grants weren't designed to solve problems at scale. They were designed to route federal dollars through demographic categories that align with progressive political priorities. The CDC carved the population into identity groups, then funded programs tailored to each one — not because the science demanded it, but because the ideology did.
When a public health agency spends half a million dollars studying intimate-partner violence exclusively among LGBTQ youth at a single university, it isn't conducting broad-based research. It's performing a political loyalty ritual with taxpayer funds.
Three million dollars for Colorado to address "COVID-19 related health disparities" stands out for a different reason. We are years removed from the emergency phase of the pandemic. The acute crisis has passed. Yet COVID-era funding streams — vague, expansive, and largely unaccountable — keep flowing as though it's still March 2020. These zombie appropriations persist not because communities need them but because bureaucracies fight to keep every dollar they've ever received. The administration is right to ask why pandemic-era money is still walking out the door.
The combined rescissions total $1.5 billion. The specific programs listed in the reporting account for a fraction of that sum. Which raises the obvious question: what else was in the pipeline? If the items that have surfaced publicly are representative of the broader portfolio, Americans should wonder just how many billions in federal funding have been quietly transformed into vehicles for ideological project management.
This is the core problem with how Washington distributes money to states. Grants aren't neutral. They carry conditions, frameworks, and assumptions baked in by the agencies that design them. When the CDC writes a grant requiring applicants to address "health disparities" through a demographic lens, it isn't simply funding health care — it's mandating a worldview. When the Transportation Department prioritizes EV charger deployment in "disadvantaged communities" over, say, high-traffic corridors where chargers would actually get used, it has abandoned infrastructure logic for redistribution logic.
The result is a federal funding apparatus that doesn't serve the country. It serves a theory about the country — one in which every expenditure must first pass through a filter of identity and equity before it can justify its existence.
Colorado, Illinois, California, and Minnesota share more than their voting patterns. They share a governing philosophy that treats federal money as an entitlement — a perpetual subsidy for state-level progressive experimentation. Electric vehicle mandates that their own residents can't afford get backstopped by Washington. Public health programs narrow enough to serve a graduate thesis get funded as though they were national priorities.
Meanwhile, taxpayers in states that never asked for these programs foot the bill. A welder in Tennessee helps pay for San Francisco's equity-focused EV charging network. A nurse in Georgia subsidizes a Chicago hospital's demographically targeted drug-access program. The money flows in one direction. The accountability flows nowhere.
That asymmetry is what the administration is confronting. Not health care. Not transportation. The assumption that certain states deserve a permanent pipeline of federal cash to fund whatever ideological project they package as "infrastructure" or "public health."
The rescissions will face resistance. State officials in the four targeted states will challenge the action. Advocacy groups will frame it as an attack on public health and clean energy. The usual institutional chorus will insist that cutting any government program, anywhere, for any reason, constitutes a crisis.
But the administration has leverage that critics don't: specificity. When the public sees that $500,000 was headed to a single university for a narrowly scoped study, or that $15 million was earmarked for EV chargers in a metro area where most residents can't afford an electric car, the "cruel cuts" narrative collapses under its own weight. The programs weren't popular. They weren't broadly effective. They were niche expenditures with progressive branding, and the only people who will miss them are the people who administered them.
The real question isn't whether these specific rescissions survive legal or political challenge. It's whether this becomes a template — a sustained effort to audit federal grant-making and strip out the ideological overhead that has accumulated over years of unchecked spending.
Fifteen hundred programs didn't get cut. $1.5 billion did. The difference matters. This wasn't a scattershot reduction. It was a targeted withdrawal from a funding ecosystem that had stopped serving the public interest and started serving a political one.
The states that lost this money will survive without it. The question is whether they'll learn anything from losing it.
