Interview transcript:
Terry Gerton: Zoe, I’m gonna start my first question with you because as I looked at this report that you all have recently published, since President Trump took office, you’re highlighting the cancelation of almost 700 federal grant programs and almost $17 billion in funding. Can you help us understand the scale and the scope of those cancelations?
Zoe Kendall: Absolutely, Terry, and since the time of publishing that article, that amount of funding that has been terminated has actually increased. We identified another $2 billion, so we’re sitting at $19 billion in terminated grant programs, terminated grants program funding, which if we look at the federal market today, that’s over 40% of the market today and funding that’s just been wiped out. To dig a little bit deeper into that, USAID alone saw over $5 billion terminated, about $5.4 billion. HUD lost roughly $4 billion, and the Department of Health and Human Services saw over 200 programs terminated. And really, no corner of federal research or social services was left untouched. We’ve seen terminations across science, health, education and environmental programs, just to name a few.
Ryan Alcorn: And when we were digging into this data, a little bit of context — we started this work in 2022, which was a very different era of federal grant funding, as you might imagine. The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act brought in about $300 billion in new federal grant opportunities. And much of that was slated to be disbursed through 2030. Today, we see that market shrinking to a little under $50 billion. And before, as of Jan. 19, 2025, the market was a little over $80 billion. In addition to that, not only are we seeing the market of open opportunities close significantly, but we’ve also identified another $40 billion in revoked awards, which is an incredibly large number.
These are awards that have already been granted — maybe in mid-flight at the moment — some of the funding has already been disbursed, some the organizations have already begun spending that money. And that means that over 15,000 individual awards to organizations has been revoked. We’re seeing major institutions of higher learning losing funding. We see some of the largest organizations in the news, but there’s a long trail of smaller research institutions that are being affected, as well as many major state health departments are losing over $1 billion each, including red states, which is particularly interesting to track.
Terry Gerton: Ryan, I appreciate that you articulated the variety of grantees. Because I think we often forget that higher education research is a grant program. We forget that social services are typically administered in grants. And you were also talking about, I think, three different kinds of actions here: issued but revoked grant, a terminated grant, and in some cases, grants that were planned but never issued, right?
Ryan Alcorn: Correct. And those opportunities are the most difficult to track, as we’ve seen a large number of posted opportunities — NOFOs, RFAs, RFPs — that were live on websites like Grants.gov, like various exchanges, but disappeared. And Zoe’s research found some particularly interesting different ways that those programs had been removed that were just fascinating across the board for their inconsistencies.
Zoe Kendall: Yeah, so what made this so notable — it wasn’t just the scale. It was really, interestingly, the lack of standardization in how agencies communicated these terminations. So some programs simply vanished from government websites with no communication, leave no trace. Others had vague archive or expiration notices citing new priorities or executive orders. And then some programs, we had to dig into version histories or archives to read change logs communicating these terminations — which, again, the wording used for those notices really varied greatly between agencies. And so the lack of clear, standard communication — or even understanding, maybe, what the result of the OMB memo that came out on Jan. 27 that really kicked all of this off — it really created a lot of chaos and confusion for grant seekers who had probably spent months at that point preparing applications for some of these programs that just one day simply no longer existed. And as we were going through this data, it made us realize just how important it was to ensure the status of these programs — the over $19 billion in congressionally allocated funding — the status was visible to the public via this independent, transparent tracking.
Terry Gerton: I’m speaking with Ryan Alcorn. He’s a co-founder of GrantExec, and Zoe Kendall is GrantExec’s chief product and data officer. Zoe, let me follow up on your last response, because this information used to all be visible in Grants.gov. There was a lot of hubbub when DOGE took over Grants.gov. How are you finding this information now to do your research?
Zoe Kendall: That’s a great question. So when we originally did this full analysis of all the grant programs, we identified various ways that would cue us into things being off or potentially terminated. One was the Grants.gov posting would just be completely removed. You would go to the original posting URL and you’d get redirected to the homepage. You’d get an error saying, “This no longer exists,” which was strange, because usually Grants.gov — they have a closed and an archive, and they’re usually really good at ensuring that everything is closed and archived based on the dates. They’re really good with their version histories. And so a lot of this was cross-examining between what Grants.gov had — whether it was a redirect to the homepage or just a program that the close date suddenly moved up to February or January when it used to be like August for something — and going to find something else to corroborate it. And so we were finding, we could find no trace of some of these programs that we did have traces of, that we had a record of in our database previously, because we’ve been tracking the federal grant market and the entire U.S. grant market for years, that just pretty much disappeared.
Terry Gerton: So that was your cue that things were missing. Ryan, what are you hearing from grantees and agencies about the impact of these sudden terminations?
Ryan Alcorn: For grantees, it is — for lack of a better word — it’s traumatic. These are organizations that had put countless hours, sometimes hundreds of hours, into developing applications and then were fortunate enough to be awarded through a very competitive process — talking about the recipients impacted by the $40 billion cuts.
These organizations are scrambling to find alternative financing, to find private, state and local opportunities as well. But the long and the short of it is: Individuals who were impacted by this work — not just those at the organizations, but the communities that were intended to benefit from these funds — will suffer immediately. And that is something that we will feel for the next five, 10-plus years. Just the gravity of this cannot be understated, given the planning, the investments already made and the downstream effects that will come from this. So universities, research institutions, local governments and state governments, as well as nonprofits, NGOs and just about every USAID grantee and awardee, has been severely impacted.
Terry Gerton: So Zoe, as you all have created this repository, where can grantees go now to find out the current status? Are they talking to grant officers back in the agencies? If Grants.gov is not reliable, where do they go to find out what’s going on?
Zoe Kendall: Well, we actually have a dashboard that we’ve published that will allow people to — they just visit our website, GrantExec.com — they can go and view these dashboards to find the status of these programs. We are updating these — these are live updated dashboards. As we get new information in, we are publishing that. We do actually call program officers and email these offices or just ring them up on the phone to get clarification if we don’t have it, if it’s not clear. Otherwise, yeah, the best advice is to go and find the program officer, find that contact information — call the help desk at NSF, for instance, to go get clarity.
Ryan Alcorn: That’s right. And we will say, it is no easy feat at this moment, because we do hear frequently that the points of contact from two months ago are no longer the same program contacts for these individual awards. We will say the next place to look is to diversify your funding options — so looking at state and local funding if you’re a private entity, as well as opening up to the private sector. So establishing those relationships, identifying alternative funding opportunities. We have seen an increase — it’s not sufficient to fill the full gap — but we have seen an increase in private foundation funding for these issues, whether it’s global health, whether it is DEI, whether it’s deep research. There are private foundations that are stepping up. We are anticipating seeing more of that. We’ll see how things play out, but there are alternatives and there still are folks looking to help.
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