Most Americans have never heard of the CFR—the Code of Federal Regulations—let alone 2 C.F.R. Part 200 but, like so many aspects of our vast federal bureaucracy, it has an outsized impact on the quality of our lives and, thus, should command some attention. These days everyone wants to know how to turn off woke and weaponized spending in Washington—understanding, as they do, that the permanent bureaucracy is ideologically left and working, in many cases, against the express wishes of the president and the voters. A new rule from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will finally make it possible for voters to get a handle on these out-of-control agencies.

Part 200 is the operating manual for a federal grant machine that moves more than $1 trillion every year and, for too long, it has answered more to permanent bureaucrats than to the taxpayers who fund it. OMB’s proposed overhaul of Part 200 would restore a basic principle of republican government: Public money should be spent for lawful public purposes by officials who answer to the American people.

Federal grants can serve legitimate public purposes, from medical research and disaster relief to roads and public safety. But a system this large, diffused, and insulated from voters is also an open invitation to waste, ideological capture, and bureaucratic abuse.

The federal funding system has become sprawling, complex and increasingly detached from meaningful public scrutiny. The Biden administration showed how quickly those weaknesses could be weaponized. Taxpayers were pressed into financing drag shows in Ecuador, critical race theory training, radical gender programs, and grants that rewarded institutions for parroting diversity, equity, and inclusion dogma. The problem was bigger than a few outrageous awards. The grant bureaucracy had become a quiet but powerful arm of the woke and weaponized administrative state. 

President Donald Trump and the OMB are now moving to shut that abuse down.

The most important reform is accountability. The proposed rule requires senior appointees to review discretionary awards before they are issued and ensure that selections comply with law, agency priorities, and the national interest. Peer review and expert advice remain available. But unelected panels and anonymous bureaucrats will no longer have the final word over major funding decisions. 

That is not politicizing grantmaking. It is ending a system whereby bureaucrats are spending on autopilot.

Career expertise is valuable. Career veto power is not. In a constitutional republic, officials accountable to an elected president must ultimately be the ones taking responsibility for discretionary decisions about taxpayer money—not people with no connection to the electoral process. Voters cannot fire a peer-review panel. But they can hold a president and his administration accountable.

The proposal also gives OMB’s grant framework clearer regulatory force. Informal guidance can be selectively adopted, quietly revised, or even ignored. A binding regulation creates uniformity, legal force, and public accountability through a public process of notice-and-comment rulemaking. Future administrations should not be able to dismantle taxpayer protections with an internal memo and no public scrutiny.

This is no executive power grab. To the contrary, Congress has long charged OMB with financial-management and grant-policy responsibilities across the government. OMB is using its established authority to confront a grant system that has grown far beyond the oversight structures built to control it. 

The proposed rule change would eliminate fixed-amount awards except where Congress has authorized them and eliminate fixed-amount sub-awards, which are mechanisms that can limit financial reporting and obscure whether money was actually spent on allowable costs. It would strengthen sub-award reporting, require greater justification for payment requests, use Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system before disbursement, and improve risk reviews for applicants with histories of fraud, poor financial management, or noncompliance. 

No responsible company would send billions of dollars through layers of contractors, affiliates, and middlemen without any system in place for knowing where the money ended up. Taxpayers should not accept a lower standard from Washington.

OMB would also make clear that discretionary awards may be suspended or terminated when they no longer advance program goals, agency priorities, or the national interest. Federal grants are not private endowments. They are conditional instruments for carrying out the purposes Congress authorized. When an award no longer serves those purposes, the government must be able to stop the checks. 

Just as important, the rule would prevent federal awards from underwriting unlawful discrimination and ideological projects untethered to the government’s statutory missions. It would restrict the use of grant funds to promote unlawful DEI practices, disparate-impact theories, radical gender ideology, and chemical or surgical sex-transition procedures on minors, while protecting faith-based organizations from discrimination. 

Naturally, the left will call these reforms dangerous because the left benefited from the old system. A trillion-dollar grant bureaucracy operating behind layers of procedure gave ideological activists enormous power with very little accountability. They could steer money, reshape institutions, and then hide behind so-called expertise when taxpayers objected.

OMB’s reform breaks that model. This proposal is the most serious overhaul of federal grantmaking in a generation. That is exactly right. It does not abolish grants, sideline legitimate expertise, or rewrite programs created by Congress. It restores the constitutional chain of command, makes spending more traceable, giving agencies tools to stop waste and ensure that public funds serve public law and not the ideological ambitions of the deep state. 

OMB should finalize this rule. The American people deserve to know who is spending their money, where it is going, and who will be held responsible when it is wasted. A trillion-dollar grant machine should not answer to itself. It should answer to the taxpayers.