Since President Trump took office for his second term, his administration has cut, frozen or slowed up to $177 billion in federal grants, according to a tracker released on September 16 by the States United Democracy Center and Grant Witness, a group of scientists, researchers and lawyers. The Associated Press reported that the losses reached every state and the District of Columbia.

The tracker is called Lost Funds. The groups say $177 billion is nearly 10% of the federal government's discretionary spending — the part of the budget Congress sets each year.

This is money Congress approved. Then the administration stopped it from going out.

Where the money was cut

The tracker sorts the lost money into categories. As of its September 16 update, the biggest were:

• Health: $58.9 billion
• Food and nutrition: $36.6 billion
• Disaster relief: $29.8 billion
• Environment: $25.9 billion
• Transportation: $10.6 billion

Health, food, disaster help and the environment make up the large majority of the total. These are not side programs. They are the money that keeps a county health department running, food on the table and a town rebuilding after a storm.

The disruptions hit 3,494 local governments, 753 school districts and 437 businesses, plus 15,424 other recipients, the tracker counts.

The groups built it from USAspending, the government's own public record of federal spending. They count three kinds of harm: a grant formally cancelled, a grant frozen so the recipient can't draw the money, and a slowdown where fewer awards go out or fewer dollars move than in past years. Their downloadable data lists every program, state by state, with the news coverage behind each one.

Red states are not spared

The five states that lost the most, the AP reported, were California, Texas, New York, Illinois and North Carolina.

Texas is second only to California. The tracker's Texas page puts the state's loss at $16 billion. Louisiana, Ohio and Florida each lost about $5 billion. Oklahoma lost $3 billion, about $1.6 billion of it in slowed SNAP food aid.

And red states have had a harder time getting the money back. When the Department of Health and Human Services cancelled nearly 700 CDC grants worth about $11 billion in March 2025, KFF Health News found that about two dozen Democratic-led states sued and won a court order. In blue states, nearly 80% of the cut grants were restored. In red states, fewer than 5% were.

Of the five states with the most cancelled CDC grants after those rulings, four are led by Republicans: Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma and Ohio. Texas lost at least 30, as its measles outbreak spread across the U.S. and Mexico and killed at least 16 people. Colorado sued and kept 10 of its 11 grants. Its neighbors that didn't sue — Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma — lost 55 grants and kept none.

Across the country, the tracker says, states have joined 23 lawsuits and restored $35 billion. That leaves most of the $177 billion still gone.

What it looks like on the ground

The tracker's front page pairs the numbers with what they cut off. A few examples it gives:

• Texas: The administration cancelled a $1.2 million grant to process DNA evidence needed to prosecute sexual assaults.
• Mississippi: Federal money for 10 Regional Education Laboratories was cancelled, pulling support from teachers behind the state's turnaround in reading scores.
• Michigan: Grants to researchers studying birth outcomes for Black women were suddenly frozen. They fear work to close the gap in maternal deaths will come to a halt.
• Iowa: The Department of Agriculture scrapped a fellowship that gave new farmers paid training and land.
• Nevada: The EPA cancelled a $156 million solar grant that promised low-income households a 20% cut in their electric bills.
• Ohio: A $23.3 million award for internet devices and skills training was cancelled before it paid out — in a state where nearly a million residents lack high-speed internet at home.

In Alaska, the tracker lists $325 million in stalled money for rural ferries. The Alaska Beacon reported in February that the federal rural ferry grant pays for almost half of the state ferry system's operating costs — and that the administration failed to open that grant process in its 2025 budget year. Almost $78 million of the 2026 ferry budget was supposed to come from it, and state officials warned ships could be tied up in midsummer. A Republican state senator, Bert Stedman, said the hole could be "pushing $80 million." The money did not come through until August 21, when federal and state officials announced the ferry system would finally receive $410 million in grants delayed from the year before.

We've written about several of these cuts one at a time: the $38 million in health grants cancelled for not matching the administration's priorities, the EPA clean-air grants whose termination a judge voided, and the gutting of FEMA's disaster workforce. The tracker shows how big the pile is when you add them together.

Congress wrote these checks

Spending decisions belong to Congress. A 1974 law, the Impoundment Control Act, says a president can't simply refuse to spend what Congress approved.

Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has ruled that the administration broke that law by holding back money from Head Start, from National Institutes of Health grants and from FEMA.

Congress can insist that money go out. Some Republicans in Congress have pushed the other way. Georgia's Andrew Clyde wrote a bill to repeal that 1974 law entirely. Ohio's Troy Balderson said "Congress decides" — then his office walked it back the next day, and months later he voted at Trump's request to cancel $9.4 billion Congress had already approved.

The AP said it asked the White House for comment on the analysis.

What the tracker shows

The Trump administration has cancelled, frozen or slowed up to $177 billion in federal grants to all 50 states and DC, according to Lost Funds — $58.9 billion in health, $36.6 billion in food aid, $29.8 billion in disaster relief and $25.9 billion in environmental programs. Texas lost $16 billion, second only to California. States have restored $35 billion, and last year KFF Health News found that red states had gotten back fewer than 5% of their cancelled CDC grants, against nearly 80% in blue states.

Source

• Trump administration has cut or frozen $177 billion in grants to states — Mike Catalini, Associated Press, via Mississippi Today, September 16, 2026.
• Lost Funds — States United Democracy Center and Grant Witness, data updated September 16, 2026. Image: Lost Funds.