Colorado’s senior U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and the administration of Gov. Jared Polis denounced the pending elimination of 34 federal energy grants to Colorado last week, charging the cuts are politically motivated. 

The $500 million-plus in grants on the chopping block funded assorted projects and studies, many involving green energy, and are among more than 300 such energy grants, totaling nearly $8 billion, that will be canceled nationwide.

Polis’ energy office issued a statement accusing the Trump administration of using the cuts to target states like Colorado that went for Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris last November. Bennet lashed out at U.S. Energy Secretary and fellow Coloradan Chris Wright — founder and former CEO of Denver-based Liberty Energy — charging he let Colorado down.

Bennet claimed Wright’s priority “is to serve the political agenda of President Trump, not the interests of our state or the American West.”

Strong words, no doubt calculated to strike a chord in a state where Trump baiting has become a ritual for elected Democrats, like Bennet and Polis, who wield all the levers of power.

Political rhetoric aside, however, Coloradans won’t lose much to these cuts — which grantees still can appeal — and U.S. taxpayers, including those in our state, will gain plenty.

Permit us to add some much-needed perspective. 

For starters, as reported by our news affiliate Colorado Politics, a quarter of the awards, about $3 billion, were approved between the election in November and Trump’s inauguration last January. That suggests they were handed out in a rush by the outgoing Biden administration — probably as a political reward to the same states the Trump administration is accused of targeting. In other words, politics as usual.

“On day one, the Energy Department began the critical task of reviewing billions of dollars in financial awards, many rushed through in the final months of the Biden administration with inadequate documentation by any reasonable business standard,” Wright said in a press statement.

As Colorado Politics also reported, some of the projects awarded to Colorado-based entities are actually located in other places — including in “red” states, such as Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming and Kansas. (That’ll teach ‘em to vote for Trump!)

What really should raise eyebrows, though, are the specifics of some of the grants soon to be axed by Wright’s Energy Department. Like $50 million awarded in January, days before President Trump’s inauguration, to the Tribal Energy Consortium, a “clean” energy initiative for 20 tribes in seven states, including Colorado’s Southern Ute and Ute Mountain tribes.

According to our news affiliate in the nation’s capital, the Washington Examiner, the consortium is actually based in New Mexico, not Colorado, and the grant raised eyebrows given that the consortium’s total funding in the two previous years had never exceeded $50,000 annually.

The grant’s purpose? According to the project’s squishy description at the time the grant was awarded, it would “empower tribal communities to reduce methane emissions on tribal-owned-and-operated marginal conventional wells and at oil and gas facilities on tribal lands.”

Not all the studies and projects were so dubious, but as Wright’s Energy Department now maintains, all the canceled projects “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” Expendable, in other words.

Sounds like Wright is serving not only the “interests of our state” but also in fact of every U.S. taxpayer — by paring a bloated federal behemoth and our nearly $38 trillion national debt.