The Trump Administration Has Cut, Frozen or Delayed $177 Billion in Federal Grants in Every State and D.C., Nearly 10% of All Discretionary Spending, According to a New Tracker Built From the Government's Own Data.

The Trump administration has eliminated, frozen or delayed roughly $177 billion in federal grants since the president returned to office in January 2025, touching every one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a tracking tool released Wednesday by the States United Democracy Center and a group of researchers and scientists operating as Grant Witness. The total amounts to nearly 10 percent of federal discretionary spending, the portion of the budget Congress sets each year outside of Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt.

The database, called Lost Funds and hosted at lostfunds.org, is built from the government's own records at USASpending.gov, cross-checked against agency notices, court filings and reporting on individual grants. Its organizers say it will be updated as the administration takes further action and as the dozens of lawsuits challenging the cuts move through the courts, several of which have already produced rulings against the government. The tool lets users sort disruptions by state, agency, program and status, distinguishing grants that were terminated outright from those that were paused or whose payments were held up.

Health, nutrition, environmental protection and disaster relief made up the largest share of the interrupted money. The examples the organizers highlighted span the political map: maternal health grants in Michigan, education research funding in Mississippi and assistance programs for minority farmers in Iowa. California, Texas, New York, Illinois and North Carolina saw the largest dollar amounts of disrupted funding, a list that includes the two most populous Republican-led states as well as the two largest Democratic ones, reflecting the fact that federal grants flow largely by population and formula rather than politics.

"By bringing thousands of funding disruptions together in a publicly accessible, verified database, Lost Funds puts the magnitude of their impact on full display," said Scott Delaney, a co-founder of Grant Witness, which began as an effort by academic researchers to document terminated National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation awards in the spring of 2025 and has since expanded across the government. Kelly Rader, research director at States United, a nonpartisan group that describes its mission as defending democratic institutions, said the tracker "shows the extraordinary scale and real human impact of these disruptions" and that the pattern goes well beyond the routine reshuffling that happens when a new administration changes priorities.

The administration has defended its grant actions as necessary to root out waste, end programs it considers ideological, and bring spending in line with the president's agenda, and it has argued in court that agencies have broad discretion to terminate awards that no longer serve government priorities. The Department of Government Efficiency's early cancellations, the freeze on foreign aid, the termination of diversity-related research grants and the clawback of pandemic-era education and public-health funds all contributed to the total. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the analysis.

The $177 billion figure arrives the same week the Government Accountability Office reported that the government paid federal workers $9.5 billion not to work in 2025, most of it through the DOGE deferred-resignation program, and as the Senate and House head into a spending fight ahead of the September 30 deadline to fund the government. State budget officers in both parties have warned for months that they cannot plan around federal money that may or may not arrive, and the tracker gives them, for the first time, a single number to argue over.