WASHINGTON—Last year, GOP President Donald Trump issued orders to politicize some federal grants, especially transportation money. Red states would get it, and blue states—particularly New York and New Jersey, for the Hudson River tunnel would not.
Trump later reversed course on that September 2025 ban. But now Trump and his Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought, want to politicize every federal grant for specific projects and needs, all $1.2 trillion worth yearly, as of the end of fiscal 2025 last September 30.
That’s a lot of money.
Yanking it away or giving it out based on ideological reasons is what OMB proposed. It’s also what 150 House Democrats, the BlueGreen Alliance—a coalition of unions and green groups–and the non-profit Project on Government Oversight (POGO) are raising hell about. The Trump ideological tilt would hurt a lot of communities and cost a lot of jobs. Like almost 1.2 million, the alliance says.
A capitalist economy is supposed to be governed by the market’s “invisible hand.” But government plays such a large role—and not just from grants—that the U.S. has a mixed economy instead.
So when the federal government puts an ideological thumb on the scale, responding to right-wing dogma, corporate lobbying, campaign dollars, and clout, everyone else takes second place, or worse.
Trump’s OMB would do that: Carve his executive orders from last year into the stone of federal rules. That includes his ideological agenda, such as banning anything dealing with diversity, equity, and inclusion, ending funding for “green” projects, and attacking workers and unions.
The BlueGreen Alliance quantified the losses. In a letter to OMB and a report entitled Bait and Switch,” it disclosed that “more than 3,034 manufacturing, clean energy, and industrial sites now face tax restrictions due to” last year’s so-called One Big Beautiful Budget Act, the Trump-GOP $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the 1%.
That law alone puts at risk “$695.2 billion in capital investment and 1,184,996 jobs,” the report, released July 14, said.
“When Donald Trump stepped into the Oval Office in January 2025, we were on a path to a better future for working people and the planet, but Trump has put a torch to it,” said Alliance Executive Director Jason Walsh. “Serious damage has been done, but it’s not too late to start fixing what Trump and the GOP Congress tried to destroy.
“We need leadership in Washington, D.C. who will focus on creating good-paying jobs, generating clean energy, and building the supply chains we need for America to achieve widespread prosperity, security, and equity.” That’s not what Trump, Vought, and their corporate backers want.
Shut down wind power generation off the coast of Rhode Island, for example, and not only do construction jobs stop—with that project almost complete—but so does a new power source for energy-starved New Englanders and their factories, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., says.
And turning off the money, or distributing it only to ideologically correct projects, could harm worker safety, adds BlueGreen Vice President of Health Initiatives Charlotte Brody, RN.
“Watering down the safety provisions meant to protect communities from catastrophic industry explosions makes us all less safe. And by abandoning the protections for mine workers from silica, weakening OSHA enforcement, and stripping away the right to join a union, Donald Trump has made work more dangerous and workers less safe,” Brody explained.
“No one in Washington was elected to make American lives more vulnerable and dangerous. It’s past time for Congress to remember what it means to be ‘for the people’ and refuse to rubber-stamp budget requests and policies that protect the wealth and power of billionaires, instead of growing the economy for and protecting the rights of working people.”
Trump and his minions brag about the plan to conform federal grants to a presidential agenda.
“Under the president’s management agenda, agencies are ensuring grants and cooperative agreements align with the administration’s America First priorities, that funds go only to high-performing grant recipients, and that grant recipients are held accountable,” Trump’s Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service says.
Pushing the agenda as the lead qualification for federal cash is what the Democrats and POGO object to. Trump’s OMB doesn’t spell out “accountability” or ”high-performance standards,” either.
In official objections sent to OMB, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Democrats organized by Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., say OMB’s proposed rules, unveiled at the end of May, would leave grant recipients and applicants on tenterhooks.
They wouldn’t know, even from one month to the next, if money would keep flowing or not. Money could be halted mid-stream.
The most disadvantaged communities in the U.S. would be hurt the most, and ideology would triumph over facts, which is not what Congress intended when it wrote 1,800 laws over the years, setting up grant programs, the lawmakers said.
And politicizing grants would leave decisions with a new top layer of political appointees beholden only to the president—regardless of party—who names them, overriding Congress’s “power of the purse” and the Constitution’s separation of powers, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) adds.
“The proposed rule violates the separation of powers doctrine,” POGO’s analysts wrote to Vought’s agency. “Executive orders and regulations cannot override laws and statutes.”
The 1974 Congressional Budget Act also banned presidents from impounding—refusing to spend—appropriated money, POGO pointed out. The only exceptions are when Congress approves presidentially proposed “recissions.”
“Congress appropriates funding for specific causes, with the public interest in mind… with the goal of administering each program fairly and objectively across all states.
OMB proposes “federal funding be aligned with ‘the president’s policy priorities,’” which do not account for changing conditions or more-efficient processes. And a president’s policies “do not necessarily align with the established public interest of each program.
“When OMB seeks to inject the president’s priorities into federal funding, it changes the purpose of funding,” POGO wrote, deadpan.
Federal grants are not to be used “to execute the president’s agenda, but to reinvest taxpayer money” to improve “the quality of life” of the U.S. people. An ideological shift “ultimately harms constituents.”
Rep. Scott, in his 29-page letter, and the other 150 Democrats, in theirs, make the same points in more detail, and add the impact, by area, to the constitutional violations.
Vought and OMB “attempt to codify” Trump “orders that espouse radical interpretations of civil rights and constitutional law that are currently the subject of numerous legal challenges,” plus “divisive and questionable legal doctrines,” wrote Scott, the top Democrat in the GOP-run and highly ideological House Education and the Workforce Committee.
If you’re going to change the rules governing distribution of those billions and trillions of dollars, the changes “should de-emphasize the role of political appointees, embrace the concepts of scientific peer review, integrity, and independence, and not place the political pursuits of the president above the Constitution and laws of our land,” Scott added.
Scott said OMB would “unilaterally suppress community improvement and scientific advancement across a huge spectrum of issues, dangerously allowing culture wars to set the federal funding agenda and setting the nation back based on ideological caprice.”
In just one example Scott cites, he stated grant recipients “should be able to use federal dollars without the threat of micromanagement of every decision to determine if it adheres to the administration’s ideology.
“The administration cannot condition funding on specific beliefs—in this case, the non-existence of transgender people—in violation of the [Constitution’s] 1st Amendment. However, grantees may feel forced to succumb to such ideology in order to acquire a grant or prevent its termination.”
Scott called that tilt “particularly absurd and distressing because this administration is notorious for denying facts supported by science, such as the effectiveness of vaccines and the reality of climate change.”
It “would give more discretionary power to a chief executive who has proven willing to use the power he does have to punish political enemies and those who disagree with him…This proposed rule should be abandoned in its entirety.”
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