A Democracy Drive Thread
Grants frozen, projects cancelled and aid held back — aimed at the states, cities and voters who opposed him, while the money kept flowing to friends.
Congress decides how federal money is spent; the president’s job is to spend it as the law directs. This thread tracks, in chronological order and with sources, how the Trump administration instead treated appropriated funds as leverage: freezes and cancellations aimed at Democratic-led states and cities, threats to cut off places whose voters chose the “wrong” mayor or whose officials would not help ICE or free an ally, and the courts and auditors that repeatedly found those moves unlawful. The entries are presented in order so the pattern speaks for itself.
August 20, 2020
In his own words
Most of California’s forest land is federally managed. Experts cite climate change and drought as the main drivers of the fires.
“I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests.”
October 13, 2024
On the ground
Former officials, including a former White House disaster adviser, described him resisting aid to Democratic-led states until aides showed him how many of his own supporters lived in the affected areas.
January 27, 2025
On the ground
OMB memo M-25-13 directed agencies to “pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance” as of 5 p.m. on January 28. Medicaid payment portals in all 50 states went down the next day. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan issued an administrative stay minutes before the deadline, and the White House rescinded the memo within days while insisting the freeze itself continued.
February 11, 2025
On the ground
Congress had appropriated the money, and FEMA paid it on February 4. NYC Comptroller Brad Lander called the withdrawal illegal. The city sued.
February 21, 2025
On the ground
After Gov. Janet Mills told Trump “we’ll see you in court” at a February 21, 2025 White House event where he warned Maine to comply with his sports order “or you don’t get any federal funding,” the administration opened a cascade of probes and funding actions against the state. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins froze money for a Maine child-nutrition program over disputed Title IX compliance. Maine sued the USDA and won: the administration agreed to release the funds, and the state dropped its suit.
February 27, 2025
On the ground
Staff warned the cancellations would cause improper payments and identity theft. Emails obtained by House Oversight Democrats showed the decision was political retaliation. The order for newborn registration was quickly rescinded.
“No money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.”
March 7, 2025
On the ground
A joint federal task force announced the review March 3 and the cancellation four days later. The Wall Street Journal reported officials wanted federal oversight of the university through a consent decree. Columbia later agreed to many of the demands and paid more than $200 million to settle.
April 4, 2025
On April 4, 2025, U.S. District Judge John McConnell — for the second time — found the administration in violation of his preliminary injunction against an across-the-board freeze on federal grants, ruling that FEMA's new “manual review” process was “covertly” withholding disaster-relief money from 22 states and Washington, D.C. He found the review was an attempt to carry out Trump's executive order denying funds to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, and ordered the money released. States including Oregon and Hawaii said tens of millions in storm, wildfire, and flood-recovery aid had been frozen.
On the ground
In Florida, 18 of the 22 counties set to share nearly $250 million voted for Trump. FEMA called the program “wasteful and ineffective” and “more concerned with climate change.” Twenty states sued, and a judge blocked the administration from reallocating the money.
April 14, 2025
On the ground
The demands followed a March 31 review of $9 billion in federal funding. A federal judge later ruled the freeze illegal retaliation.
April 16, 2025
On the ground
Trump posted that Harvard should be “Taxed as a Political Entity” after it refused his demands, and the administration froze $2.3 billion in grants. Treasury officials sent the request to the IRS’s acting chief counsel. Federal law bars the president from directing the IRS to audit or investigate any taxpayer.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”
May 13, 2025
On the ground
By May 2025 the retaliation campaign against Maine had spread well beyond schools and sports. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Regional Director Paul Souza notified Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Commissioner Judy Camuso that all federal grant funding to her agency would cease by May 15 unless it rescinded a hiring policy adopted in 2020 — one requiring that hiring panels be half women, with organizers making “every effort to include more women” where the panel had an odd number. Federal officials called the quota itself sex discrimination barred by Title IX. The department rescinded the policy within days. Nothing about the action concerned transgender athletes, school sports, or wildlife management; it was the same statute turned on a state agency that had no connection to the original dispute — a demonstration that once a state is targeted, any of its agencies can be reached.
May 23, 2025
On the ground
OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta called the watchdog’s finding “wrong and legally indefensible.” The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program was funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. A federal judge later ruled the freeze unlawful.
June 16, 2025
In his own words
Duffy posted on X as protests against ICE raids spread from Los Angeles to other cities. His April 24 directive had already told every DOT grant recipient to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement or risk losing funding. California and other states had sued in May; a federal court blocked the directive on June 19 and made the injunction permanent on November 4, 2025. The administration appealed, then dropped its own appeal in January 2026.
“The @USDOT will NOT fund rogue state actors who refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.”
July 9, 2025
On the ground
Trump’s budget proposes cutting the Appalachian Regional Commission by 93%, from $200 million to $14 million. That would effectively end its grants for workforce, opioid recovery and infrastructure projects across 423 counties in 13 states. More than 80 regional organizations wrote to Congress opposing the cut.
July 14, 2025
On the ground
The suit, filed by 22 attorneys general and two governors in Rhode Island, calls the freeze a brazen attack on the separation of powers. California alone was owed about $939 million.
July 16, 2025
On the ground
The administration said the project was in default and couldn’t deliver its first segment by 2033. Trump had attacked the project for years.
July 20, 2025
In his own words
He also demanded Cleveland’s baseball team go back to “Indians.” The Commanders’ RFK Stadium site deal had been announced earlier in the year; both teams said they had no plans to change their names.
““I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.””
July 23, 2025
On the ground
The deal cleared the way to restore most of the more than $400 million in grants cut in March. Columbia agreed to overhaul student discipline and adopt a new definition of antisemitism, and did not admit violating civil-rights law.
July 29, 2025
On the ground
The freeze covers the Duke School of Medicine and its health research system. The administration said it could become permanent if Duke is found in violation of Title VI.
July 30, 2025
On the ground
FEMA said damage in Christian and Todd counties for individual assistance and Leslie County for public assistance was “not of the severity and magnitude” to qualify. Gov. Andy Beshear and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, both Democrats, said they would appeal.
August 4, 2025
On the ground
Reuters found the condition in 11 grant notices covering search-and-rescue gear, emergency managers’ salaries and backup power.
August 5, 2025
On the ground
GAO concluded the administration violated the Impoundment Control Act by cutting off grants under Trump’s executive orders against “equity-related” activities and by releasing $8 billion less in new and continuing awards from February to June than in prior years, a drop of more than a third. A federal judge had already ruled in June that the grant terminations were illegal. The New York Times had mapped thousands of canceled NIH grants across the country.
On the ground
NTIA said a violation “would result in rejection of the Final Proposal.” New York’s law caps low-income plans at $20 a month, and a California lawmaker dropped a similar bill after NTIA warned it would put the state’s funding at risk. The FCC also scrapped the long-term 1,000 Mbps goal and its analysis of broadband affordability.
August 7, 2025
On the ground
The order, “Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking,” requires political review of funding announcements and awards and directs OMB to rewrite federal grant rules so awards can be terminated at will. Researchers warned it puts scientific funding under political control.
August 8, 2025
On the ground
UCLA was the first public university targeted this way. University of California President James Milliken said a payment of that scale “would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system.” The administration had already extracted $50 million from Brown and $221 million from Columbia.
On the ground
Lutnick’s letter accused Harvard of breaching its obligations on federally funded inventions and announced a “march-in” proceeding, escalating the administration’s months-long campaign against the university after it refused demands to audit faculty and students’ viewpoints. In September, Lutnick said the government wants a cut of all university patents from federally funded research — “the United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit” — a revenue-sharing idea Congress dropped when it passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.
August 24, 2025
In his own words
Congress had committed to fully fund replacing the Francis Scott Key Bridge after a cargo ship destroyed it in March 2024.
““I gave Wes Moore a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge. I will now have to rethink that decision.””
August 25, 2025
On the ground
Commerce argued the nonprofit was created illegally and moved the center under NIST. Natcast laid off most of its staff. More than 200 companies, including Nvidia, Intel, Apple and Google, had joined the research consortium.
August 26, 2025
On the ground
Most signers stayed anonymous for fear of retaliation. The letter objected to unqualified leadership and to Noem’s rule that she personally approve contracts over $100,000. FEMA said the leave was “not intended to be punitive.”
September 15, 2025
On the ground
The money was owed for pandemic emergency costs. A former FEMA chief of staff called the move “highly irregular.” House Democrats condemned the “secretive” cancellation.
October 1, 2025
On the ground
Vought announced the hold on October 1, 2025, saying the money must not flow “based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” The Gateway Hudson Tunnel is the most important rail project on the Northeast Corridor. The freeze was widely seen as pressure on the two Democratic leaders during the shutdown fight. Funding was later released after lawsuits; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Trump had tried to trade the tunnel money for naming rights.
On the ground
Vought announced the cuts on social media: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” The targeted states were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. The cuts included up to $1.2 billion for California’s hydrogen hub and up to $1 billion for one in the Pacific Northwest. Democrats warned the move would drive up electricity prices.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”
On the ground
Recipients included MIT, Brown, Penn, USC, Dartmouth, UVA, Vanderbilt, Arizona and UT Austin. Within three weeks MIT, Brown, Penn, USC, UVA and Dartmouth rejected it.
October 2, 2025
During the October government shutdown, OMB Director Russ Vought executed the deconstruction Project 2025 had mapped: freezing tens of billions in infrastructure and clean-energy funds aimed largely at blue states and moving to mass-fire federal workers and dismantle agencies. Trump cast it openly as turning power over to the project — even posting an AI video depicting Vought as the Grim Reaper.
October 3, 2025
On the ground
Vought said the money was on hold “to ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting.” The Red Line extension would add four stations on Chicago’s South Side. Gov. JB Pritzker said the administration was “holding bipartisan funding hostage.” Durbin said the project would serve 100,000 people.
On the ground
Florida was the only applicant for FEMA’s new Detention Support Grant Program, which reimburses states for detaining undocumented immigrants. The money was to cover building, staffing, feeding and equipping the Everglades detention camp, where the state had already spent at least $245 million, and the “Deportation Depot” in Baker County.
October 14, 2025
In his own words
Calling Mamdani a communist, Trump said he “wouldn’t be generous to a communist, a guy that’s going to take the money and throw it out the window,” and promised, “We will clean up the crime in about 30 days.”
“I wouldn’t be generous to a communist, a guy that’s going to take the money and throw it out the window.”
In his own words
He has no authority to move matches, and FIFA said it would not move any games.
““If I think it’s not safe, we’re going to move it out of that city.””
October 17, 2025
On the ground
Vought blamed “the Democrat shutdown” for draining the Corps’ ability to manage projects. The paused work spanned California, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Oregon, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware and Colorado. Murray, the top Democrat on Senate Appropriations, called it “a historic and serious, politically motivated abuse of our taxpayer dollars.” She and Rep. Marcy Kaptur said Congress hadn’t even been given a list of the projects. Separately, the Corps’ plans steered more construction money to red states while cutting it in blue ones.
“The Corps will be immediately pausing over $11 billion in lower-priority projects & considering them for cancellation, including projects in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore.”
October 22, 2025
On the ground
He also denied Maryland’s appeal over May flooding in its two westernmost counties. The decisions fell mostly along party lines.
October 24, 2025
On the ground
USDA claimed the contingency money could not legally be used for regular benefits. Democratic lawmakers urged Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to use it. Courts later ordered the benefits funded.
October 30, 2025
On the ground
During the shutdown, as SNAP is cut off, the Bureau of Land Management keeps approving oil and gas drilling permits at its normal pace: 474 in October. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the department was “grabbing any cash that was laying in any drawer” to pay staff, including permitters.
November 3, 2025
In his own words
In a Truth Social post, Trump said the city would face “total economic and social disaster” under Mamdani. The federal government was providing $7.4 billion to New York City in fiscal 2026, about 6.4% of its budget, according to the New York State Comptroller. Mamdani won the next day.
“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival!”
November 10, 2025
In his own words
As flights are cut during the shutdown, Trump orders air traffic controllers working without pay back to work, says any who don’t will be “substantially ‘docked,’” and promises $10,000 bonuses to those who never took time off. He says he would welcome the others’ resignations.
“Anyone who doesn’t will be substantially ‘docked.’”
December 11, 2025
On the ground
Trump signs an executive order directing the Justice Department to sue states over their AI laws and conditioning $42 billion in rural broadband money on states dropping AI rules the administration deems “onerous.” It creates an AI Litigation Task Force and directs the FCC and FTC to move toward preempting state rules.
January 6, 2026
On the ground
A senior administration official said the programs were frozen over “rampant fraud” and “giving money to illegals.” The department did not cite evidence of fraud in all five states. The freeze followed a video by conservative influencer Nick Shirley alleging fraud at Somali-run child-care centers in Minneapolis; Minnesota officials disputed the allegations.
January 13, 2026
On the ground
SAMHSA abruptly terminates more than 2,000 mental health and addiction grants worth nearly $2 billion for “non-alignment” with its priorities. Less than 24 hours later, after bipartisan outcry and a letter from 100 House members, the administration reversed itself. A source said the cuts came from political appointees, not agency staff.
February 5, 2026
On the ground
Trump officials tell Chuck Schumer the president will release frozen funding for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed after him. Schumer rejected the offer. The project’s commission warned it would soon have to halt work and lay off about 1,000 workers if the money stayed frozen.
February 9, 2026
On the ground
Trump breaks with long bipartisan tradition by inviting only Republican governors to the White House session of the National Governors Association’s annual meeting. Those excluded included NGA vice chair Wes Moore, the nation’s only Black governor, and Colorado’s Jared Polis. The NGA, chaired by Republican Kevin Stitt, withdrew from the event, and 18 Democratic governors said they would boycott the White House dinner. After the backlash, Trump backed down and allowed Democratic governors to attend.
March 3, 2026
On the ground
The administration said it would defer $259.5 million in Minnesota’s Medicaid claims for the fourth quarter of 2025. Minnesota said the deferral process had previously been used for individual claims, never for entire service areas. The state argued the move unconstitutionally imposed retroactive conditions on its funding and was arbitrary and capricious.
March 16, 2026
On the ground
In a December 18, 2025 letter, the USDA told Colorado that five counties had to recertify more than 100,000 food-assistance households within 30 days or the state would lose millions in SNAP funding. Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson first blocked the order in January. His March 16 written injunction found the letter “as astonishing as it is brief” and said it “runs roughshod” over the safeguards Congress wrote into SNAP. He noted it “did not arrive in a vacuum” but amid a “barrage of threats and actions designed, by all appearances, to punish Colorado,” including the plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
“This larger context gives the game away; the pilot project seems to be about punishment and nothing more.”
March 31, 2026
On the ground
A judge orders the University of Pennsylvania to comply with a Trump EEOC subpoena that sought names and contact information of its Jewish employees. More than 150 Jewish faculty had told the court the request evoked historical persecution and threatened their personal security. The EEOC later withdrew the subpoena under a resolution agreement.
April 15, 2026
On the ground
Archbishop Thomas Wenski said the program, which houses 81 children, would have to shut down within three months. HHS said fewer children were in its care. The cut came days after the pope criticized the Iran war and Trump called him “weak.”