President Donald Trump’s proposed reform to give senior political appointees the authority to block or terminate woke federal grants that undermine policies a majority of Americans endorsed in the 2024 presidential election is driving congressional Democrats up the wall.

“As proposed, this regulation would result in a seismic and ill-informed change to an enormous portion of the United States economy and would upend the established understanding of how federal appropriations are carried out, undermining the integrity of government programs,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and 11 Democratic colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought in a July 13 letter.

DeLauro is the ranking member on the Appropriations Committee and its Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. What she means by “the established understanding” of how federal grants are reviewed and approved is the present system in which unelected bureaucrats — who, on average, are paid considerably more and enjoy better benefits than most taxpaying Americans — are insulated from public accountability and transparency in deciding who gets trillions of tax dollars in the form of grants for research, analyses, services, and advice.

Because the vast majority of career civil servants in the federal government are Democrats, that system is infamous for handing out trillions of dollars to advocacy groups, education institutes, law firms, universities, and corporate organizations that push for woke policies and programs favored by far-left Democratic Socialist-type public officials like the Connecticut Democrat. The Federal Register announcement of the Trump proposal documented literally thousands of examples of such grants totaling hundreds of billions of dollars going to “questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.”

And in an August 7, 2025 White House Fact Sheet, the need for the Trump proposal’s implementation was illustrated by the fact that “federal grants have funded, for example, Drag shows in Ecuador, training doctoral candidates in Critical Race Theory (CRT), and developing transgender-sexual-education programs.” The same document also cited “an unsafe lab in Wuhan, China — the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic — engaged in gain-of-function research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)” and “in a direct assault on free speech, the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocated millions to develop AI-powered social media censorship tools.”

Interestingly, DeLauro and her 11 Democratic colleagues claimed in their July 13 letter to OMB’s Vought that “the proposed regulation would affect tens of thousands of research grants awarded annually by the [NIH], the [NSF], the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and many other federal scientific agencies, which support groundbreaking research that underpins breakthroughs in medicine and technology that can save and sustain lives and improve the standard of living across the country and the globe.”

DeLauro and company also worry about the impact of the proposal’s inclusion of measures designed to result in greater transparency of the whole grant-awarding and management processes, noting that “more reporting responsibilities and financial auditing requirements are demanded, new employment reporting mandates are imposed, and burdensome reimbursement mechanisms are promulgated.”

Such illustrations are why the Trump proposal presented earlier this year are necessary. As explained, “the federal government must provide more oversight and transparency regarding how federal funds are used in grantmaking to avoid the recurrence of similar issues in the future. Under the proposal described in this document, federal agencies must return to designing assistance programs and award activities to align with essential public purposes authorized by law.”

“Effective oversight also includes following executive branch policies that eliminate various kinds of wasteful spending that occurred in previous years, such as unlawful DEI mandates and other unnecessary add-on activities that increase project costs and complexity without serving the underlying public purpose of the award,” the administration stated. “The proposed reforms are necessary to ensure greater accountability for use of public funds, and that every taxpayer dollar the Federal Government spends either improves American lives or advances American interests.”

Democrats like DeLauro also argue that the proposal “would inject politicized unpredictability into the funding of awards,” because proposed and ongoing grants could be rejected or terminated by presidential political appointees who do so with the belief that federal funds should be used to implement presidential policies that were approved in an election.

But that consideration points to the fundamental issue underlying the debate about this proposed rule, which faces an uncertain future thanks to Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. As The Washington Stand’s Suzanne Bowdey reported Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) caved on the Trump proposal in an effort to induce Senate Democrats to vote for a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government through the end of the year. The House version of the interim funding CR does include support for the Trump proposal, so a showdown on the issue seems all but assured when both chambers of Congress are back in session after the Labor Day holiday.

Though it will likely be framed by the mainstream media as a venal power grab by Trump, the actual issue that will be on the table when that Senate/House showdown occurs is this: Does the president, who is granted by the Constitution the exclusive authority to manage the executive branch of the federal government in carrying out laws approved by Congress, have the authority to appoint subordinate officers specifically tasked to implement policies the chief executive presented to voters in the previous election? If the answer is, as DeLauro and her Democratic colleagues clearly believe it to be, no, then the president’s ability to manage the executive branch to bring about policies approved by voters is sharply limited.

The Supreme Court has in recent decisions, however, gone a long way toward approving a broad understanding of presidential prerogatives in managing the executive branch. In Trump v. United States, for example, the high court held that “Article II of the Constitution vests ‘executive Power’ in ‘a President of the United States of America.’ The President has duties of ‘unrivaled gravity and breadth,’” as well as “the President’s power to remove — and thus supervise — those who wield executive power on his behalf follows from the text of Article II.” Such power is required if the president is to perform his fundamental constitutional duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Speaking as a former Reagan political appointee and an investigative reporter and editor covering the federal government for nearly four decades, I’ve seen up close how unelected and effectively insulated bureaucrats routinely frustrate policies favored by chief executives. So, my view is that it is better to have a president able to carry out his or her mandate from the voters, who in a republic should have the final say. That also means career bureaucrats who are supposed to do their jobs in non-partisan obscurity will no longer be able to dole out federal tax dollars to advance left-wing causes they back without having to worry about being held accountable.

The problem for some is that the president you like today may be succeeded by a new chief executive whose policies and programs run directly counter to everything your guy backed. Is that a realistic worry? Quena González, senior director of Government Affairs at Family Research Council, responds to the apparent dilemma this way:

“Liberals are complaining that the proposed rule is a power grab by the Trump administration, but the actual proposal would reduce the ability of unelected bureaucrats to obstruct the administration’s stated policies and priorities. I suppose conservatives might fret that future liberal administrations will turn this authority around to target federal funding of conservative causes, but that assumes two things: that conservative causes are likely to be favored by the unelected apparatus, and that conservative projects will thrive long-term under the nurture of taxpayer subsidies. Neither history nor biblical governing philosophy bears out either assumption.”

Dr. Robert Moffit, a former senior political appointee at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and nationally recognized expert on Medicare/public health issues, has no doubt that the Trump proposal should be adopted.

“The democratically-elected president is directly responsible for executive branch policy, including the programs that his agencies decide to fund with taxpayers’ dollars. He cannot shirk that responsibility by delegating it to career officers. In the teeth of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, no president can pretend that the career bureaucracy is somehow above partisan politics or ideological bias in the administration of grant programs. No president should be that naïve. So, of course, his appointees should shoulder the responsibility, and assume the praise or blame, good or bad press, that comes with the territory.”