Every time you turn around the Republican majority hands Democrats another win.
And yes — they’ve done it again.
We keep hearing about the ‘deal’ that is close to being struck regarding the government spending bill to avoid another looming government shutdown. (Don’t threaten ME with a good time…)
But did you know a big part of that deal relies on EXCLUDING a proposed rule that would have effectively HALTED the corruption and waste in federal grant spending?
President Trump’s White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) has Russ Vought at the helm.
He has been at the epicenter of the Trump Administration’s constant fight to shed light on the ridiculous spending happening without any transparency or accountability.
And one of the ways the Trump Administration has attempted to codify so many of President Trump’s Executive Orders and the push towards transparency — and take the power out of the hands of unelected technocrats, like Fauci — is to create a rule.
One rule to EXPOSE them all? Sort of.
The rule proposed by OMB Director Vought would require strict reporting on the use of funds distributed via federal grants.
It would codify transparency in federal government spending! (THIS is what I voted for!!!)
And… it would put those unelected technocrats we are always rightly warned about in all the dystopian novels… in their place; with those who have been DULY ELECTED actually calling the shots.
And NOT the Faucis of the world.
Sound good?
It would have been, if Senate ‘Republicans’ hadn’t completely caved and let the Democrat threat of another government shutdown hold sway.
But that’s exactly what went down over the weekend, according to this from The Hill:
A spending bill unveiled Sunday by Senate Republicans would temporarily block the Trump administration’s proposal to give political appointees control over hundreds of billions of dollars in scientific grants.
It emerged from bipartisan discussions in the Senate Appropriations Committee and was reviewed and approved by GOP leadership.
In a statement, Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was “pleased” the provision was included.
Collins in July urged the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to withdraw portions of the rule. Her concerns were echoed by GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) as well as many Democratic lawmakers.
“I advocated for significant changes to the proposed rule … citing its potential to politicize grants and harm small, rural communities, families, and biomedical research,” Collins said.
Under the proposal, all discretionary awards from the federal government would have to be reviewed by senior administration officials, who could deny them if they do not fit the president’s agenda.
The rule would ban research on diversity, equity and inclusion, in addition to gender, as grant conditions and would place a broad prohibition on international scientific collaborations. (Emphasis added.)
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To put this in perspective, I want to offer up OMB Director Vought’s own take using COVID and Fauci as a prime example.
Here’s his explanation of how those on the Left use highly compensated unelected technocrats to wield ungodly control:
People like Fauci are who the Left believes should be making every grant decision instead of the appointees that the President selects—whether it’s gain of function research or pure graft. They are not for science; they are for corruption without accountability. https://t.co/dIlDVLyEYN
— Russ Vought (@russvought) July 26, 2026
Just imagine a scenario where the federal funding that Fauci controlled for gain-of-function research in Chinese labs comes with REQUIRED TRANSPARENCY.
And… if that transparency included oversight by duly elected officials, rather than the unrestrained whim of that same highly compensated unelected technocrat?
In that case, with this rule, it is possible that the entire ‘plandemic’ never even happens.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are putting forward arguments like this — and Republicans just fall in line:
Trump & Russ Vought proposed a rule to take every federal grant in America hostage.
They don't care about making our tax dollars work better—they just want them to work for Trump.
Well, Democrats BLOCKED their corrupt rule, and I'll be fighting to kill it permanently. pic.twitter.com/by8TfSRirS
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) August 5, 2026
But how much money are we really talking about?
Harken back to the early days of DOGE. We’re talking BILLIONS.
And the true degree of hidden spending still blows my mind.
Check out the sheer degree to which we lack transparency (and thus, any oversight!) with this out of control federal grant spending, as revealed by these findings compiled by POGO – the Project on Government Oversight:
Grants are one of the primary mechanisms through which federal funds flow to states, local governments, school systems, health care providers, and nonprofit organizations. Yet despite the scale and importance of these programs, the overwhelming majority of grant funding cannot be tracked to the local level using publicly available federal spending data.
POGO’s analysis reviewed approximately $958.6 billion in domestic grant spending from FY 2024. Of that amount, more than 74% — approximately $712.6 billion — could not be traced to any specific county, city, or zip code.
Only 20.7% of prime awards included local place of performance data. This means that out of the $958.6 billion expended by these grants during FY 2024, only $198.3 billion could be traced from beginning to end.
The grant programs that cannot be tracked to the local level include numerous major programs. One such program is Medicaid, which distributed more than $614 billion in federal funds to support individuals and families with health care costs. Only 0.2% of that can be tracked to the local level. Similarly, of the $19.4 billion spent through the Children’s Health Insurance Program, only 0.1% can be tracked to specific communities. Notable transportation programs also had poor performance in tracking funds. Federal Transit Formula Grants spent $8.2 billion and State of Good Repair Grants Program spent $4.6 billion, but the programs reported local place of performance information for only 1.8% and 0.5% of funds , respectively. (Emphasis added.)
Those are completely unacceptable numbers.
You can’t stop waste, corruption, or even verify the effectiveness of funding this or that… if you don’t even have the transparency to create metrics for where it’s going!
But as Director Vought pointed out in a different social media post in June, the outrage from the Left is a tell-tale sign of just how badly they want to maintain the ability to covertly fund… whatever their anti-American hearts desire:
The freakout by those on the Left subsidized by taxpayer funds over OMB’s update of the regulation governing federal grant making tells you how important it is to keep the bureaucracies from leaking out spending that is woke, wasteful, and contra to the policies of the Trump…
— Russ Vought (@russvought) June 13, 2026
Taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be easily routed by bureaucratic sycophants for radical purposes.
Transparency and the ability to STOP funding on that basis will stop that.
Or, it would have — but for the feckless Republicans who love siding with the Democrats in the Senate.
Those Democrats called on Director Vought of the White House Office of Business Management to back away from the proposed rule in a letter signed by every Senate Democrat; here’s an excerpt:
Dear Director Vought:
We write to express our strong opposition to your proposed regulation on federal financial assistance (Fed. Reg. Vol. 91, No. 103, Friday May 29, 2026) and to insist you rescind it immediately. Your proposal exceeds OMB’s authority, will make it impossible for grant recipients to faithfully carry out the funding priorities that Congress establishes in statute, and would turn federal grants into a new cudgel for the President to unilaterally advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals.
The type of discretion the President intends to bestow upon himself through this proposed rule is counter to all past precedent and ignores the reality of how appropriations and authorizing laws are drafted.
This proposal dramatically expands agencies’ authority to the point where the President could terminate or suspend any grant at any time for any reason and without any notice. The Trump administration’s actions over the last year and a half have already shown how these types of arbitrary cancellations create chaos and new costs, making it harder for grant recipients to provide the intended public benefit.
Here’s the problem with that argument.
It’s the same as the security versus liberty argument.
When push comes to shove… FREEDOM wins out! That is the American view, and what makes us different from every other nation that willingly compromises on that dichotomy!
Do you want skilled and knowledgeable individuals making decisions at high levels? Definitely. Without a doubt.
But does that mean the unelected ‘experts’ should get to decide — without oversight by the duly elected — on spending American tax dollars?
Not a chance.
I agree with Mark Meadows’ take — OMB Director Vought is “over the target”!:
This OMB update to federal grant-making rules is exactly the kind of reform we needed.
Taxpayer dollars should never be used as a slush fund for woke NGOs and radical causes that actively undermine America.
The freakout says it all. @russvought is over the target. https://t.co/AvQf0RaRzQ
— Mark Meadows (@MarkMeadows) June 13, 2026
To be clear, the rule isn’t completely dead.
It is simply delayed.
But if Democrats convince Republicans to kill the proposed rule completely, will that even matter?
It will definitely have an impact on transparency and the ability in the future for combating waste, fraud, and corruption to the tune of billions of dollars.
But it doesn’t have to hamstring the Trump Administration completely, according to this (obviously anti-Trump) report from the digital news outlet NOTUS:
The White House’s proposed formal rule united the groups that have individually been battling the Trump administration’s attacks on their funding for the last 18 months. Nonprofits, cities, states, universities and the scientific research community called for Congress to act — and in a way, Congress responded.
But the problem for Congress is that blocking the rule does not stop the Trump administration from continuing to make the changes that the rule essentially formalized, current federal employees and former grant and budget officials told NOTUS.
“This is an unusual rule in so far as the most problematic things in it are all reflective of actions the administration has already been taking, and therefore reflective of authorities that the administration has already been claiming,” said Jacob Leibenluft, who served in the OMB at the end of the Biden administration. “This is as much codifying a set of approaches and actions that the administration is already taking as it is asserting new theories about how to approach grantmaking.”
The pause on the rule is also temporary, lasting only as long as the spending bill itself, currently set to expire on Dec. 11.
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The problem is, if that rule isn’t put in place, the fight for TRANSPARENCY and OVERSIGHT on the use of American tax dollars will always be an uphill battle, at best.
In a nutshell, some things never change.
President Trump will have to fight to expose wasteful and corrupt spending by the federal government right up to the very last moments of his term.
But it would be nice if Senate Republicans WOULD change, and stop making that job harder at the behest of Democrats.
Like I said — some things never change.
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