How Congress could stop this, DOL moves toward block grants, and $1 billion in grants listings.
Plus, a shift at Commerce and an update on missing grants and awards.
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Hello
Greetings from D.C., where as I write this a velociraptor little girl is complaining I’m working and not showing her enough videos of people grilling stuff. Is there a multiyear backstory here? Yes. Does it involve a two year old yelling “Baby needs to grill!” in the middle of the night? Yup.
Happy Memorial Day! A quick note: my predictions on what will happen to programs in the Great Trump Workforce Consolidation of 2025 is taking a week off. They’ll be back next week.
Toplines
News you should know affecting money that gets people to work.
How Congress could stop Trump grants terminations (if it wanted to).
Something I have been thinking about—and something D.C. usually isn’t very good at of late—is how to adapt and strengthen grants structures based on what we have learned thus far about how things could go wrong. The other thing I have been thinking about is that if the Elon Musk campaign money cannon really is shut off, will red state elected leaders stop worrying about primaries and say something about grant cuts based on Ctrl+F searches they complain about behind the scenes?
Which comes to this: Congress explicitly acting to stop cuts in their own districts—especially the red states very reliant on federal dollars—would be the ultimate gamechanger in much of what’s happening to the federal government. But the Hill would have to act effectively and surgically. Given that Congress is a bazooka, not a scalpel, that’s real hard.
So where would I point the lawmaking bazooka? On the grant side, there is a potential solution that is cleaner than arguing about impoundment and more disruptive to the Administration’s way of doing these cuts.
In 2020, the Trump Administration set up its current spate of killing lawful, well-performing grant programs by removing a requirement in the Uniform Guidance—the stereo instructions for applying for and running federal financial assistance—that largely limited ending grant awards “for cause.” The Biden Administration kept this change in place in its April 2024 revision to the guidance after attempting to repeal it. (Probably shouldn’t have done that, in retrospect.)
I wouldn’t restore “for cause,” though. There is a lot of nonsense that could be done with that language to try to make cuts that could cause good grantees to look like financial risks down the line. Instead I would get rid of the basis by which most grants are terminated by the Administration: that the award “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” I don’t like this provision anyway because I think it sets up abuse—[WAVES AT EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENED THE PAST FEW MONTHS]—and in my experience, there are so, so, so many ways to bring along a lawfully run grant project to match up with any administration’s priorities. Even this one’s.
So how would you do it? I think a forward-looking strategy is easier, but if I wanted to save current awards, I would attach a provision looking like this (very rough mockup) to any operations appropriations for agencies running a grant program:
[AGENCY] is prohibited from using funds appropriated herein for terminating grants for no longer effectuating program goals or agency priorities under 2 C.F.R. 200.340(a)(2) of the 2020 Uniform Guidance, or any subsequent provisions allowing such terminations, for any federal financial assistance awards made by [AGENCY] prior to enactment of this bill.
I also would attach a similar provision to any grant programs I wanted to save from future terminations on this basis.
Obviously, President Trump would veto this legislation, but given that we kinda keep pushing funding the government up to the deadline, that’d create a choice, wouldn’t it? Especially if there was something he wanted funded? And Congress could be so bold to use things like “leverage” in negotiating with the Administration?
Also obvious: it’s highly doubtful Republicans will do this, and this seems like the type of thing a Democratic majority would overthink to the point of doing nothing. Yet, so much of American society relies upon these grant awards because recipients are able to do things that the government doesn’t have the capacity to do well or, quite frankly, shouldn’t do because it’s not good at it (but the work wouldn’t get funded without government doing it). It’s going to take years to get these organizations to trust the government again, and it will take real, meaningful action put into practice in an effective and well-delivered way.
This would be a first good step to rebuilding confidence. It gets rid of a bad provision that costs taxpayers money through the government not completing projects with cash that can’t be spent elsewhere. This move also preserves the actual reasons to terminate grants, like, say, buying a fleet of pontoon boats with your NIH money that is for non-pontoon boat research.
DOL and Ed set up funding plans.
The Department of Labor published the latest round of state formula allotments for the dollars that make up much of what America invests in workforce development. It never hurts to take a look and see how small the pie gets cut because of perpetual underfunding by the Hill.
If you do, keep in mind the population of working people in each state and the abundance of needs, as well as that this money has to go toward training first and what gets people to training close to last, if at all.
Also keep in mind how little hard-to-work states get due to population size, while not offering many services of their own.
The Education Department, which continues to exist, published a notice of its funding priorities on “Evidence-Based Literacy, Education Choice, and Returning Education to the States.” I could provide my commentary, but honestly, go check Amanda Fuchs Miller’s LinkedIn. It’s a great read.
This week’s grants listings number: $1 billion.
It’s getting sparse, but there is new Transportation and non-government apprenticeship money.
Behind the paywall.
I use the phrase “block-grantification” to describe what’s happening to workforce dollars.
Some notes on changes at the Department of Commerce.
Updates on what grant awards are missing.