Brief of diving:
- Trump administration issued an executive order this month aimed at streamlining and strengthening the supervision and coordination of Federal discretionary grant process.
- The order directs the federal agencies to review the grant awards to ensure that they fulfill the “national priorities and interest” of the Administration and evaluate their progress each year. It will also simplify the language to the questions of the application for subsidies, select the applications that “advance the political priorities of the President” and require that the agencies reform their policies so that the agencies can terminate grants that do not meet the interests of the Administration.
- Pressure groups represented by local and county governments say they believe that new administration policies could make it harder to obtain aid.
Divide vision:
The executive order of August 7, which improves the supervision of federal subsidies, is the last of several Trump administration actions to block the federal money to go to recipients or funding work that do not fit the priorities of the Trump administration.
The order aims to describe as “diversity, equity and inclusion and other far left initiatives”. It directs the agencies to select requests for discretionary subsidies that advance the political priorities of the Trump administration and avoid projects that support the race or gender, immigration without documentation and the existence of transgender people.
It also encourages providing grant funds to a wide range of recipients “more than a select group of repeated players”. The recipients of the grant will have to present “explanations or written support, with specificity” before addressing funds for each prize.
The National Association of Counties, In a post of August 19He stated that the counties depend on federal subsidy funds to support various priorities, such as social services, health programs, public safety, disaster response and infrastructure investments.
“Changes in federal subsidies policy, especially those that apply retroactively, can create unwanted administrative or financial consequences when these programs are implemented,” the organization said.
A spokesman for the National Cities League said in an email that he is reviewing the impact of executive order on cities. The organization said that the concession process could be improved, but the executive order “adds to the bureaucratic process with more political reviews and another update to the uniform guide that bases all subsidies.”
The spokesman added that the executive order falsely states that the subsidies already in process “can be partially or completely without a substantial cause.” This movement, the NLC declared, is “contrary to the constitutional power of the Congress of the Purse”.
The NLC is trying to help cities overcome complex subsidies, forming small and large communities to request and manage federal aid, according to the organization.
In the meantime, the county leaders are asking Congress and the administration not to cancel or freeze previously awarded funds and “support the stability and continuous funding of critical projects and programs that have been properly approved, assigned and distributed,” said Naco.
