The Trump administration says it’s revoking more federal grant dollars in Illinois — this time for electric vehicle charging stations.

On the chopping block in Illinois is a $100 million grant to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency for electric vehicle charging stations and a $3.6 million grant to the Secretary of State’s office, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said.

The White House confirmed it was rescinding a total of more than $943 million in U.S. Department of Transportation funds from Illinois, Colorado, California and Minnesota, all of which are led by Democrats. The cuts, which were first reported by the New York Post, come alongside a planned $602 million in cuts to health care grants in the same states, though a federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from rescinding those grants.

The Illinois Secretary of State’s office said it had signed a contract for the execution of the $3.6 million grant with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, part of the federal transportation department, and had not been notified the grant was being rescinded.

Scott Burnham, deputy secretary of state, said the grant was intended to fund three priorities related to commercial drivers licenses in Illinois: Studying the prevention of traffic crashes and fatalities related to large trucks and buses; implementing a new test proctoring program that would mitigate fraud on the written CDL exam; and translating the written CDL exam into Spanish.

The White House, meanwhile, described the grant as “$3.6 million for the Illinois Secretary of State to conduct a research study on best practices for translating the commercial driver’s licenses (CDL) knowledge test into Spanish.”

Burnham said the exam translation portion of the grant was only worth $30,000. Furthermore, he said, the Secretary of State’s office had conducted that work with non-grant funds and already offers the written CDL exam in Spanish.

The office had planned to redirect the $30,000 to fund other grant priorities, which is permitted under its agreement with the FMCSA, Burnham said.

“The Trump administration is trying to cut funding for improving road safety, preventing crashes and saving lives in Illinois. This grant was awarded by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and executed through a legal agreement between the agency and the Secretary of State’s office,” he said in a statement.

“Attempts to cut this critical funding for political purposes is not only vindictive and irresponsible, but Illegal. The Secretary of State will fight to make sure Illinois gets every dollar that is owed.”

Earlier this week, Illinois — along with Minnesota, Colorado and California — sued over the Trump administration’s cuts to health care grants, which in Illinois included dollars that were supposed to go toward things like HIV prevention and infectious disease screenings. On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the feds from rescinding those dollars.

A spokesperson for Gov. JB Pritzker’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the state was considering a similar lawsuit over the transportation funds.

The Illinois EPA did not respond to a request for comment about the electric vehicle-related grant. The state agency was awarded $100 million from the U.S. DOT to add more than a dozen charging stations along Illinois freight corridors, according to a 2025 news release from the governor’s office.

An OMB spokesperson did not answer a question about whether any other U.S. DOT grants in Illinois were being cut. When asked why the Illinois funds had been targeted, the spokesperson alleged a “a history of fraud and mismanagement in your state,” without providing examples.

It’s not the first time the Trump administration has withheld transportation dollars from Illinois. In October, the feds froze $2.1 billion in grant dollars for the CTA, most of which was intended to help the agency fund its years-in-the-making Red Line Extension.

Those funds remain inaccessible to the agency as it continues early-stage work on the extension, which is intended to bring CTA rail access to the city’s Far South Side. The feds cited the agency’s diversity requirements for contractors when freezing the money and have said the CTA will need to “eradicate” certain diversity requirements to regain access to the funds.

In October, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said the city was considering suing over the Red Line funds, but interim CTA head Nora Leerhsen indicated more recently that a lawsuit was off the table at this point.

“Our focus is the exchange that we’re in with the federal government,” Leerhsen said last month, saying she hoped the CTA would be able to resolve the funding freeze “soon.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is engaged in a separate threat-laden exchange with the CTA over another $50 million in federal funds. In that case, Trump’s Federal Transit Administration has cited violence on the CTA, including a particularly horrific November attack in which a young woman was doused in gasoline and set on fire on the Blue Line, as the reason it might withhold those funds.

After rejecting a December plan from the CTA to boost security on the system as “materially deficient,” the feds gave the agency until the middle of March to submit a revised plan or lose funds.

Violent crime on the CTA, while elevated above pre-pandemic levels, is down about 10% from 2022.

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