2 days ago
Trump blames bureaucrats, NGOs for grant crackdown
President Donald Trump moved to tighten his grip on government spending this week with an executive order directing his political appointees to vet all federal grants.
The move marks a noteworthy shift from past administrations, where civil servants have played major roles in dishing out the federal government's vast grant spending. That was done in part to avoid the appearance of political appointees playing favorites, according to former government officials.
But after months of the Trump 2.0 team slashing spending across the federal government, the administration said concentrating grantmaking authority with political appointees will stop 'unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats from wasting taxpayer dollars.'
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The Trump executive order issued Thursday directs each agency head to designate a senior appointee to create a new process to review funding announcements and to renew discretionary grants to ensure that they're 'consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.'
The order aims to give political appointees more direct control over a sizable chunk of federal spending. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $1.1 trillion just on state and local government grants to fund programs including environmental protection and education.
The Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency boasts on its website that it has terminated more than 15,000 government grants worth about $44 billion since January.
The administration 'has already terminated many wasteful grants,' the White House said in a fact sheet. The executive order, it says, 'helps ensure that bureaucrats can't make the same mistakes in the future.'
A 'significant departure'
Trump assailed a series of grant recipients in his executive order as evidence that the process was broken, including programs that funded 'drag shows in Ecuador, trained doctoral candidates in critical race theory, and developed transgender-sexual-education programs.'
Federal grants have also gone to 'non-governmental organizations that provided free services to illegal immigrants, worsening the border crisis and compromising our safety, and to organizations that actively worked against American interests abroad,' the executive order says.
Agency bosses across the Trump administration have spent months touting cuts to federal grants and contracts inked by the Biden administration.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin declared earlier this year that the 'days of irresponsibly shoveling boat loads of cash to far-left, activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.'
Zeldin on Thursday announced that his agency would terminate $7 billion in grants to help states, nonprofits and territories bring solar power to low-income communities.
The National Science Foundation has announced the cancellations of more than 1,000 federal grants since Trump took office. Trump earlier this year proposed slashing that agency's funding by 57 percent.
The Trump administration's crackdown on grant approvals marks a 'significant departure' from how the process has worked previously, said Matthew Tejada, a former senior career EPA staffer who led the agency's environmental justice office.
'I can't name a grant program that did not have political appointee involvement, but there were varying levels of that involvement, depending on the size and scope and gravity of the program,' said Tejada, who's now a senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Political appointees in the past have sought to avoid the appearance that they were meddling in the grantmaking process, Tejada said.
He called Trump's approach an 'ineffective, unrealistic way of governing' that will ultimately slow down the grantmaking process. 'The bureaucracy exists to help facilitate government working effectively and efficiently, and this is going in the opposite direction,' Tejada said.
