From NCN 8/11/25:
Last week President Trump signed an executive order (EO), Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking, which makes significant changes to the process that federal agencies use to award, oversee, and terminate federal grants. The EO requires review and approval by political appointees, increased discretion for political appointees, new processes, additional review, and changes to terms and conditions. The EO requires grants to allow the Administration to terminate the grant for “convenience” or if the grant does not advance agency priorities. The new review process requires each agency to incorporate review and approval of funding opportunity announcements by the political appointee, continuation of existing coordination with Office of Management and Budget (OMB), review by designated subject-matter experts, review for necessary requirements for adequate evaluation and plain language, interagency coordination, additional review for scientific research discretionary grants, and pre-issuance review of discretionary awards.
Additional restrictions would prohibit grants from being used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate racial preferences, awardees that deny a “sex binary” or “the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic,” “illegal immigration,” or “any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.” References and revisions to the OMB Uniform Guidance give priority to nonprofits with lower indirect cost rates in competitive grant application processes and limit the use of discretionary grant funds for costs related to facilities and administration. Potentially, this could mean that OMB may soon make changes to last year’s major improvement of the OMB Uniform Guidance that included a de minimis 15% indirect cost rate on federal grants, for which NCN and this network successfully advocated for nearly a decade.