President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday requiring his political appointees to review federal grants in order to prevent the “offensive waste of tax dollars” seen in prior administrations.
The heads of each agency awarding grants will assign Trump’s appointees for annual reviews to ensure that federal grants “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” the executive order says. The White House listed several left-wing agendas that agencies are required not to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate,” such as race-preferential programs and illegal immigration.
“Every tax dollar the Government spends should improve American lives or advance American interests. This often does not happen,” the order reads. “Federal grants have funded drag shows in Ecuador, trained doctoral candidates in critical race theory, and developed transgender-sexual-education programs.”
Trump’s Thursday order also highlighted data indicating that the National Science Foundation (NSF) was spending a quarter of its funds on what the White House described as “diversity, equity, and inclusion and other far-left initiatives” by 2024.
The order directs officials to avoid funding “denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.” More broadly, it prohibits spending taxpayer money on “any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.”
The Trump administration has taken a variety of actions to halt or expose what it sees as wasteful spending that promotes left-wing ideology across the globe. One of its most high-profile actions was shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a foreign aid-focused entity that steered taxpayer money toward a giant leftist advocacy network, sex change clinics in India and other award recipients countering Trump’s agenda.
“The harm imposed by problematic Federal grants does not stop at propagating absurd ideologies,” Trump’s executive order says. The directive mentions how the U.S. government funded gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan, China, at a lab that has long been suspected to be a cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House also called out federal spending on AI tools for online censorship of viewpoints and on nonprofits providing free services to illegal immigrants.
“The Government holds tax revenue in trust for the American people, and agencies should treat it accordingly,” the executive order declares.
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