In theory, the Trump administration suffered a major setback this week when senators moved to block the White House’s plans to exert more control over federal funds.
In practice, little has changed for an administration that has played politics with the federal grantmaking process from Day One.
This week, the Senate unveiled a bipartisan compromise to keep the government open through December. Democrats celebrated one major concession from the Republican majority as part of that deal: It would block the White House from finalizing a proposed rule to give political appointees firm control over every federal dollar and empower the White House to cancel grants for any reason at any time.
The temporary block won’t undo the Trump administration’s takeover of federal grants already underway.
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Just last month, the Interior Department appointed Kristen Eastlick to serve as the agency’s head of grants. She has spent much of her career seeking to expose nonprofit organizations as beholden to left-wing special interests.
She previously helped lead the Capital Research Center, frequently suggesting liberal groups masquerading as nonprofits too often receive federal dollars, and now she will help implement the Interior Department’s new political crackdown on grant funding that continues to tie up hundreds of millions of dollars in spending at National Parks and other departments.
Her new role, previously only held by career staffers, illustrates how the Trump administration continues to politicize grantmaking throughout government, even as it faces congressional pushback on its plans to codify those changes.
The White House’s proposed formal rule united the groups that have individually been battling the Trump administration’s attacks on their funding for the last 18 months. Nonprofits, cities, states, universities and the scientific research community called for Congress to act — and in a way, Congress responded.
But the problem for Congress is that blocking the rule does not stop the Trump administration from continuing to make the changes that the rule essentially formalized, current federal employees and former grant and budget officials told NOTUS.
“This is an unusual rule in so far as the most problematic things in it are all reflective of actions the administration has already been taking, and therefore reflective of authorities that the administration has already been claiming,” said Jacob Leibenluft, who served in the OMB at the end of the Biden administration. “This is as much codifying a set of approaches and actions that the administration is already taking as it is asserting new theories about how to approach grantmaking.”
The pause on the rule is also temporary, lasting only as long as the spending bill itself, currently set to expire on Dec. 11.
OMB did not respond to a request for comment.
Mary Feeney, a professor at Arizona State University who led a large program at the National Science Foundation during the Biden administration, speculated that the short-term timing on the prohibition is convenient for Republicans who are up for reelection in November. Susan Collins, the Republican chair of the Appropriations Committee, is facing a tough fight for her seat in Maine and will be able to claim credit for the deal.
“I would expect that there are some actors in Congress who see this as beneficial to their individual campaign agenda. Like, I can use this as a talking point, or I can use this to show I did something,” Feeney said.
Even if Congress opts to extend the ban after the midterms are over, agencies are continuing to formally implement new layers of political review first introduced by DOGE.
Last year, the Education Department eliminated its grants policy and risk management offices as part of widespread layoffs. When it subsequently withheld $7 billion in grants on its usual July 1 release date — nearly 20% of the annual funding the department makes available to schools nationwide ahead of each school year — career staff left at Education were not consulted.
“We found out on the news,” said a former Education Department employee in a grants office. The same was true when later that year it barred up-front awards to five school districts in northern Virginia by placing them on “high-risk status” because they did not conform to administration’s views on gender identity.
The department, which is in the process of transferring much of its grants administration to other federal agencies as part of the effort to dismantle it, has cut out career staff from much of the grants process altogether. The Trump administration is also using the “suspensions and debarments” process to proactively prevent groups that don’t align with it from receiving grants, the former employee said, a departure from long-standing federal regulation that suggests agencies only ban entities after they have violated the law.
“From my experience being there, the politicals were all too happy to do it themselves,” the former employee said.
Interior last month introduced Eastlick to staff in an email by saying the new appointee would “lead DOI’s evolving grants administration.” The department recently reinforced its political review process, employees previously told NOTUS, with any award worth more than $50,000 requiring a sign-off from division leadership as well as two political appointees at the department. As of early June, more than 1,400 awards worth more than $360 million were caught up in the resulting backlog.
Two years prior, employees said, fewer than 10 grants sat in the queue.
One current National Park Service employee said that action from Congress does not change the fact that “grants and other financial assistance are continually under direct scrutiny by the department.”
The Health and Human Services Department also recently implemented new layers of political review, with funding opportunities requiring approval from Secretary Robert Kennnedy Jr.’s office and the White House before they go public. Internal documents, public records and employees all indicated the new spending regime was leading to unprecedented delays in releasing the funds.
Last month, HHS canceled without explanation more than $60 million in grants provided through its Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a small office that funds research into how patients receive care.
Despite the actions already underway, lawmakers celebrated their agreement. Collins, who previously came out against the proposed rule, said she was pleased it prevented the measure from taking effect. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), the top Democrat on the committee, led her colleagues in advocating for the provision.
“I pushed very hard and secured an important provision to prevent the Office of Management and Budget from implementing its corrupt new grants rule, which would require a Trump political appointee to sign off on every last federal grant and empower them to terminate any grant, at any point for any reason,” Murray said on the Senate floor on Monday before the stopgap spending bill easily cleared a procedural vote. “This disastrous rule would put politics above science when determining, for example, what cancer research grants to fund.”
Murray vowed to kill the rule outright as part of future spending negotiations.
Given how much the Trump administration continues to politicize the federal funding process, experts are divided on whether the prohibition is an achievement at all.
“Why would we think that one little piece of rulemaking or difference in congressional practice would have any effect? Because Congress hasn’t been able to really do anything to stop the current agenda,” Feeney said.
Leibenluft, the former OMB official, said there could be value in the lawmakers’ efforts, even if it is largely symbolic. “The pushback, in an aggregate, is meaningful. It has the potential, at least, to create a framework when the administration does further specific actions, for the public and ultimately legislators to say: ‘You know, this is exactly why we pushed back on the rule. You’re not supposed to be doing this.’”
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