Just days after inauguration, the administration announced a “temporary pause” in federal grant programs. The uproar made it a lot more temporary than the administration hoped. The freeze hit every community in every congressional district, and the administration beat a hasty retreat in a terse two-sentence statement.
Buried in the argument, however, was important language. The initial guidance asserted that federal officials “have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities.” That launched an unprecedented effort to reshape federal aid, as the administration’s management agenda, released on Dec. 8, made clear. It’s just two pages long, but it upended 60 years of federal policy.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress and successive administrations have been attaching a Christmas tree’s worth of conditions to federal grants. State and local governments don’t want to give up federal cash. To get it, they’ve had to follow a lengthening list of “crosscutting requirements,” ranging from the civil rights standards to rules for environmental review, health and safety, labor standards, rehabilitation programs, anti-ageism, and a host of others. In 1980, the Office of Management and Budget tabulated 59 different requirements, but no one really knew how many there were.
The more grant programs grew — from 387 in 1968 to 1,274 in 2018 — the harder the money was to turn down. That made the requirements Velcro for federal mandates.
For decades, state and local governments complained about these strictures; they wanted to get rid of them but, of course, keep the money. Trump gave them part of what they wanted — but not, as it turned out, what everyone wanted, and at a higher price than almost anyone wanted to pay. Trump’s management agenda promised to “eradicate woke and weaponized programs across government,” which meant ending requirements devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), among them ones attached to federal aid.
The U.S. Department of Education told the states that it viewed DEI standards, which it didn’t define, as violations of the civil rights law because they were providing preferential treatment to selected groups. It asked state officials to certify that they weren’t using DEI. Republican officials happily and quickly complied. Democratic officials refused to sign and headed to the courts.
It was the first time any president had tried to use federal grant programs to remove grant requirements instead of adding new ones on. But there was a huge catch. It proved a federalism flash point.
For decades state and local officials not only sought to remove crosscutting requirements but also to give themselves more control over the money. On this, the Trump administration had very different ideas. The December management agenda reinforced the message of an August executive order requiring all federal agencies to name a senior political appointee to ensure that grant decisions “are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest,” that grant programs had to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” and that political appointees had to revise grant programs “to permit termination for convenience,” especially if “the award no longer advances agency priorities or the national interest,” defined of course by presidential policy.
That fundamentally redefined Trumpism’s accountability in federal grant programs. Every president, of course, has awarded grants to jurisdictions that favor the president’s wishes and not to governments that opposed the president. At the core of the Biden administration’s policy, however, was a focus on enforcing existing rules rather than aggressively strip-mining money away from programs that didn’t fit the administration’s policies.
Trump cut a string of education grants, work-study aid for college students, grants to nonprofits for victims’ services and substance abuse, and aid for housing programs designed for the homeless — all because the programs didn’t match his goals for what the federal government ought to be doing, or that they served DEI, in the administration’s view.
But beyond these discretionary programs, the administration took aim at entitlements as well. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act stripped $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade. SNAP funding — the federal government’s food assistance program — is being reduced by as much as $300 billion. These amount to the biggest cuts in the programs at any time in their history. State governments will have to make up the difference, or recipients will simply be without the support they currently receive.
In just a few months, the Trump administration has boldly put its mark on federalism. It has eliminated at least one major crosscutting requirement that had come along with grant programs for the last 60 years. With a wink, it said it was sending power to the states but, in reality, made the states responsible for programs the feds had been paying for. It crossed the line that once protected entitlements.
And, most fundamentally, it redefined accountability, away from the law and from the crosscutting goals that have endured across administrations. It pivoted instead to the mandate that Trump has asserted. It’s impossible to find any administration in recent memory that has created more federalism fireworks.
Given the administration’s considerable skill with the executive’s pen, it’s a good bet that they’re not nearly done yet.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
