(image from grants.gov)
Staffers at the U.S. DOGE Service have taken control of Grants.gov, the website that disseminates information about federal grants and provides a mechanism for applying for the grants.
According to unnamed sources referenced by The Washington Post, DOGE employees will now have the power to review and make decisions regarding the awarding of federal grants. The moves are part of a larger effort to limit resources for activities not endorsed by the Trump White House, according to the Post.
Grants.gov “provides a centralized location for grant seekers to find and apply for federal funding opportunities. Today, the Grants.gov system houses information on over 1,000 grant programs,” according to the website. These programs award more than $500 billion annually, per the website. The Grants.gov program management office was established in 2002, per the website.
The site itself did not contain any information — or even indication — regarding the reported DOGE takeover. There were no indications of it within the unit’s X (formerly Twitter) feed. As of Saturday afternoon, the latest post on the X feed was from March 25.
On February 6, the Grants.gov X feed reported users were having “intermittent difficulty” accessing the site, but these difficulties were resolved the same day, per a subsequent post.
According to the Washington Post article, a DOGE engineer eliminated “many federal officials’” ability to post notifications of available grants, and did not inform the employees their permission to do so had been suspended. The NonProfit Times was not able to independently confirm this report.
The Post further claimed grant-posting authority would eventually be under DOGE’s auspices.
Per the Post, managers at Grants.gov were told the site was “under systems maintenance” and grant notices were to be sent to grantreview@hhs.gov, an e-mailbox at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) allegedly monitored by DOGE employees. HHS has had responsibility for managing the site for some time, according to the Post.
Grants.gov has a maintenance schedule posted in which routine maintenance is conducted during the third weekend of every month. According to that schedule, April’s maintenance will be on the 19th through the 21st, during which time the production system will remain online. During subsequent schedule monthly maintenances during the remainder of the year, however, the system will be offline for its maintenance.
The Trump administration has taken an active hand in monitoring and suspending a wide swath of federal grants, including some already granted, as well as grant opportunities, since taking power in January 2025.
As reported in March by National Public Radio (NPR), https://www.npr.org/2025/03/31/nx-s1-5345708/doge-data-access-labor-cfpb-hhs several DOGE employees had previously been granted administrative access to HHS systems. In a March 31 piece, NPR cited a court filing in AFLCIO v Labor Doge Employee Access https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25873564-aflcio-v-labor-doge-employee-access-exhibit/ as indicating Luke Farritor, “a (General Services Administration) employee who is detailed to HSS,” as having “administrator privileges for the department’s grants payment management service, its contracting system and its human resources management system.
