Republican Senators Cave to Dems, Shield More Than $700 Billion in Untraceable Grant Spending
This week, the majority Republican Senate Appropriations Committee handed Democrats, and the Establishment Uni-Party, a massive win by suspending a key rule in the upcoming budget continuing resolution bill.
The Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance rule proposed by the Office of Management and Budget in May was blocked by the Senate Appropriations Committee in a reported capitulation by Republicans to Democrats on the committee.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) called the rule “deeply flawed” and noted that “a huge group of organizations…have come out against it,” according to The Hill.
The Hill reported that this would “rein in a proposed rule from the White House budget office that would give Trump appointees more power to withhold congressional appropriations” by requiring the senior political appointees in charge of agencies to sign off on grants before administering them.
This assessment politicizes the rule by characterizing fundamental accountability as somehow a “political weapon.” But the rule is not merely a political statement about how federal grants should be administered. It contains concrete reforms aimed at fixing one of the federal government’s most persistent transparency failures: the inability to follow taxpayer money after it leaves Washington.
A July 2026 report from the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) examined the 60 largest domestically focused federal-assistance programs, accounting for 92.3% of federal assistance spending in fiscal year 2024.
Its findings were alarming. More than 74% of federal grant funding reviewed—approximately $712.6 billion—could not be traced to a county, city, or ZIP code. Prime-award information made only 20.7% of grant spending locally traceable, while subaward data added just another 5%.
That means taxpayers can often see which state agency, university, nonprofit, or other intermediary received a federal award, but not where much of the money ultimately went.
POGO described the federal subaward-reporting system as “fundamentally broken and incomplete.” The problem is not hypothetical. The report cited previous government reviews showing that recipients frequently used subawards without properly reporting them. One Government Accountability Office review found that although an estimated 70% of prime recipients in two small-business programs used subawards, only about 10% reported them through USAspending.gov.