The Dirty Dozen: Wasteful Federal Grants You’re Paying For

Hell hath no fury like big-government trough feeders facing budget cuts. Oh, how the piggies have pounced on President Donald Trump’s attempts to rein in out-of-control spending in a federal government with a morbidly obese deficit. 

“Most people voted for cheaper eggs. They did not vote for this chaos,” Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said Wednesday at a grandstanding session with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the Trump administration rescinded a memo on freezing federal loans and grants. 

News flash for you, Martin: Cheaper goods and services — including eggs — won’t happen without a change in direction from the massive, unconscionable spending by Trump’s predecessor, congressional Democrats, and too many uniparty Republicans. Americans voted for sanity in their federal government, and that includes a return to fiscal restraint which ultimately will stop runaway inflation and, God willing, take a big bite out of the crushing $36.4 trillion debt.  

“Everyone knows this spending blowout happened over the last five years and some of that money is for causes that are not worthy of our tax dollars,” Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., told The Federalist in a phone interview Wednesday from his northern Wisconsin district. “We all know there’s tremendous waste, fraud and abuse in this government.” 

We do. Trump knows that, too. 

Rabid Jackals 

In his first nine days into his second non-consecutive term, this president has shown a resolve to get done what so many Americans, particularly so-called conservative politicians, have been shouting from the rafters about for years. Americans have to live within their budgets, politicians tell us. Why can’t Congress? Why can’t the federal government? 

But actually do something and much of the political class will turn on you like rabid jackals. 

Just look what happened this week with the Trump administration’s rollout of the pause on federal grants and loans. The shopaholics in Congress teamed up with a politically weakened corporate media to scream about stopped payments to recipients of Medicaid and other welfare programs. A scare tactic from the usual big government defenders. Their attorneys rapidly sprang into action and, with the help of the same New York attorney general who declared war on Trump and a Biden-appointed federal judge, they won a temporary victory against fiscal restraint. 

But Medicaid was never on the table, according to a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

“Mandatory programs like Medicaid and SNAP will continue without pause,” the memo makes clear. The freeze only targets programs that should never be anywhere near taxpayer funding, such as DEI initiatives and gender ideology extremism. 

Despite the setback, Trump held firm on his administration’s federal government funding reviews to weed out waste. 

‘Shockingly Bad’

While Dems and the corporate media made political hay with the Medicaid lie, they refused to mention the monstrous waste, fraud, and abuse in the massive welfare program. According to the Government Accountability Office, taxpayers lost more than $100 billion in “improper” payments — $50.3 billion in Medicaid benefits, and $55.1 billion in Medicare — in 2023. The payment “errors” represented 43 percent of the total $240 billion in improper payments reported throughout all federal agencies. All told, federal taxpayers were on the hook for $2.7 trillion in payment errors between 2003 and 2023, according to the GAO. 

As government spending watchdog Open the Books (OTB) tracks in a new report, 75 of a total of 441 federal agencies listed in the Federal Register are defunct, many for decades. That’s the essence of government dysfunction.

“Record keeping within the Federal Register, which is supposed to be the definitive guide to government policy, is shockingly bad,” the report states. “Not only are agencies listed that are long-defunct, but records of those agencies are often not updated, so members of the public must conduct deep research to ascertain the composition of their own government.”

Let’s take a look at some of the federal grants taxpayers have been forced to pay for, the kind of questionable-at-best funding the Trump administration is trying to clip. The Dirty Dozen, according to a review conducted for The Federalist by OTB, includes federal funding for a girl’s running club in Gaza and money to develop a “diversity audit tool.”

Here’s what you’re paying for: 

1. The State Department — $100,000 to Free to Run, Inc. The grant, which is set to expire at the end of May, was sold as a program for “Building Palestinian girls’ and young women’s resilience through … weekly running and wellness sessions.” Is Hamas on board with this girl empowerment initiative? Free to Run’s founder, Stephanie Case, is a division chief for the the terrorist-tied United National Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Talk about confusion, Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, told the Washington Examiner the Biden administration’s decision to fund the “Palestinian girls’ fun run confused “the hell” out of him. 

“None of this sh*t surprises me, but these things frustrate the hell out of the American people,” Nehls said.

2. National Science Foundation — A two-year grant award expected to top $1.5 million to Florida State University to fund “Black Feminist Epistemologies: Building a Sisterhood in Computing.” The NSF abstract defends the award in part by noting that, “Recent studies reveal that Black women enrolled in undergraduate computing degree programs at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) attest to the lack of support, mentorship, and resources that impede their ability to complete their degrees.” Just who conducted said studies is not clear. 

3.  National Science Foundation —  $119,520 for a conference titled “Re-imagining Biology Education Through Social Justice,” featuring a talk on “Gender-Inclusive Adaptations to Biology Teaching.” Imagine that. 

4. Department of Agriculture —  $717,000 to Ohio State University. The money is being used to solve the “cultural resistance in the USA and Europe [that] impedes the acceptance of insect proteins as food sources,” according to the project grant. The grant states that “to overcome cultural barriers, a multidisciplinary research initiative seeks to develop sustainable extraction methods for obtaining protein, lipids, and valuable components from insect meal.”  This thing is funded through the end of August 2027. 

5. National Science Foundation —$399,930 to Montana State University. This DEI project, funded through September 2027, is supposed to honor “indigenous knowledge” by “infusing native ways of knowing into engineering education,” but without engaging in the “misappropriation of indigenous knowledge.” What about misappropriation of taxpayer money? 

6. Institute of Museum & Library Services —  $352,799 to the University of Wisconsin System to investigate “play-based programs and spaces” at museums and develop a “diversity audit tool for practitioners to examine their play programs and spaces for diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging considerations.”  The National Leadership grant, funded through the end of next year, is a DEI project “with a specific focus on play offerings for children 0-12.” 

7. National Science Foundation  $634,856, also to the University of Wisconsin System. The grant, funded through August 2027, provides federal tax dollars for the exploration of “urgent yet underexplored dimensions of equity-minded pedagogical change work in higher education.” This urgency of equity indoctrination includes “an 8-hour short course, where participants will learn about and identify how racial exploitation and settler colonialism have shaped not only the history of the geosciences, but also its current practices and disciplinary culture.”  

8. National Endowment for the Humanities — $54,981 to support a “Critical Game Studies” minor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The grant program brought “rhetorical and literary theories together with feminist studies, queer studies and ethnic studies to investigate how game narratives shape and are shaped by power structures and cultural representations.”  Game night will never be the same. How about some LGBTQ Scrabble? Or Feminist Yahtzee? Something special from Parker Brothers. 

9. Department of Health and Human Services —  $792,443  to the University of Texas-Austin. The five-year grant, funded through July 2029, promotes the testing of a hypothesis that “it is cisheteronormativity, the societal belief that everyone is cisgender and heterosexual, that increases risk for exposure to general ACEs [adverse childhood experiences], that cisheteronormativity leads to cisheterosexism, or SGM [social and gender minority]-identity based discrimination, mistreat and violence exposure, and that exposure to cisheterosexism.” What they said. How about the societal belief that this kind of pseudoscience shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers? 

10. National Science Foundation  —  $445,600 to Ohio State University for the Girls* on Rock program, which strives to build “an inclusive outdoor STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) and mentorship experience — increasing the diversity in the geosciences with respect to gender, race and ethnicity …” Wow. The program, funded through April 2027, offers rock climbing in the Rockies with a DEI twist.  

11. Department of Health and Human Services —   $600,000 to the University of Virginia. The grant, funded through July 2029, will help the people involved in this scheme to  “identif[y] and measur[e] domains of structural ableism” which “parallels foundational work across other forms of structural oppression, such as structural racism, classism, ageism, sexism, and heterosexism.”  That works out to about $100,000 per ism.

12. National Science Foundation  — The NSF sure is busy. In this case, it doled out more than $112,000 to Rutgers University to develop “theory around processes of social control, state practices and human agency” about the deportation of “immigrants with criminal records.” The study, which concluded in 2022, was supposed to deepen the “understanding of the relationship between citizenship, the law, and policing practices that have so impacted racialized immigrant communities.” Perhaps Border Czar Tom Homan has a few choice words for “radicalized immigrant communities” about their handling of “immigrants with criminal records.” See also: The Laken Riley Act. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.