Trump order asserts political control over federal grant decisions

President Donald Trump has announced major changes to how US federal agencies make funding grants, increasing top agency officials' control of the grantmaking process in an effort to ensure disbursements align with administration priorities.

The changes, outlined in an Aug. 7 executive order, would require every federal agency head to designate a "senior appointee" to draft a new process to review funding opportunity announcements and verify that all discretionary grants "are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest."

Given that the agency heads are political appointees, many analysts see this as an effort by the White House to direct federal grantmaking at a granular level, at the expense of career officials in the bureaucracy.

Indeed, Trump's order explicitly calls for all grantmaking decisions to fall to the senior appointee or a designee rather than an agency's career staff.

"Senior appointees and their designees shall not ministerially ratify or routinely defer to the recommendations of others in reviewing funding opportunity announcements or discretionary awards, but shall instead use their independent judgment," Trump wrote.

Fears over politicization

The executive order marks a substantial change in the federal government's approach to science research, said Joshua Graff Zivin, Pacific Economic Cooperation chair in International Economic Relations at the University of California, San Diego.

"This is clearly politicizing what has historically been a reasonably non-political process," Graff Zivin told Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, Aug. 8.

One former US Energy Department official expressed concern that political appointees could arbitrarily deny a grant application, even if it met all the criteria, for reasons unrelated to the content of the proposal — for example, for saying or doing something the administration didn't like.

"It moves farther away from a process by which applicants are primarily judged by merit," the former official said in a separate interview.

The Trump administration had already clamped down on federal energy grants with a January executive order freezing disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. That order, which took aim at former President Joe Biden's pro-renewables policies, called for federal agencies to review all covered funding to ensure it complied with Trump's more fossil fuel-friendly energy agenda.

The new executive order is "kind of writing down what they've been doing, in terms of doing a line-by-line review of these financial assistance awards," the former DOE official said.

Until the new review process is in place, the executive order bars agencies from issuing new funding opportunity announcements without first receiving approval from the designated senior appointee, unless legally required to do so.

As part of the review process, agency heads or their designees would have to ensure that designated subject-matter experts review the funding announcements.

In addition, prior to issuing discretionary awards, agencies would have to meet with the senior appointee or a designee to verify that the funding is "consistent with applicable law, agency priorities, and the national interest."

Trump said the current grantmaking process funded a leftist political agenda. He said the changes would "improve the process of federal grantmaking while ending offensive waste of tax dollars."

New grant criteria

The executive order specifically barred discretionary funding awards from promoting racial preferences or discrimination, illegal migration, and "denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

The order also said such grants should not be used to facilitate "any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values."

In addition, the document said discretionary grants should go to "a broad range of recipients rather than to a select group of repeat players," and that preference for such awards should go to institutions with the lowest indirect costs.

The order also called for grant recipients to commit to respecting "Gold Standard Science," as defined in a May 23 Trump executive order. That earlier order, which claimed the Biden administration used science in misleading ways, including by allegedly overstating likely climate change effects, called for agencies to prioritize "reproducibility, rigor and unbiased peer review."

Graff Zivin expressed concern that, under the new policy, federal agencies would take "a more risk-averse and more short-termist perspective" to scientific research than in the past. He cited the executive order's language prioritizing science that serves the administration's priorities and warned that it could harm national competitiveness.

"Administration priorities tend to much more closely align with election cycles than they do with the long-term scientific health of the country," Graff Zivin said.

Graff Zivin also warned that, even if a new administration comes in and reverses Trump's policy, the executive order could have a far-reaching impact on the federal science apparatus.

"If this process becomes political and that leads to significant staff turnover, it will mean essentially a reset will be very hard if we decide ultimately that we need to be reset," he said. "There's just a ton of institutional knowledge in the subagencies that actually just do the mundane, workaday stuff."