The Left’s Glaring Hypocrisy on “Politicized” Federal Funding

For years, federal bureaucrats funneled trillions of American tax dollars to liberal causes and institutions, pushing all manner of corrosive ideologies from DEI to radical gender theory. But now that the Trump administration is ensuring that federal funds are actually spent according to the public interest, the Left is suddenly worried about a “politicized” spending process.

The latest hysteria is in reaction to a pending regulation from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would codify Trump’s executive orders barring federal funding for gender ideology and DEI, among other priorities. A regulation is stronger than an executive order because a future president must go through a new rulemaking process to undo it.

The sweeping “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” covers all 15 cabinet departments along with various other agencies and commissions. At stake is roughly $1 trillion in grants and other discretionary funding.

The regulation would specifically ensure that political appointees, not lifetime deep state bureaucrats, have the final say over how funding is allocated. Under previous Republican administrations, liberal-minded government employees have allocated funding to entities and causes that directly conflict with the policy priorities of the duly elected president.

Now, the Trump administration is taking action to end that dangerous and undemocratic status quo. The OMB rule rests on the basic principle that the individuals deciding how tax dollars are spent should be accountable to someone – namely, the president – who is in turn accountable to the American people. Career federal bureaucrats are notoriously difficult to fire, and in many cases are effectively answer to no one.

Liberals, predictably, are furious at this democratization of the federal funding process.

Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) and 44 other Congressional Democrats demanded Trump stop his efforts “to politicize the federal grantmaking process, allowing political appointees to have the final say on whether or not communities receive taxpayer funding.” They further warned that Trump was moving away from “non-partisan grantmaking.”

The American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors also said the new process would lead to greater “politicization” of federal funding.

“The Trump administration is trying to undermine the process for receiving federal funding for scientific research by using political appointees – instead of independent scientists,” the groups claimed. They said this new process would “place projects on topics such as gender identity, climate change and public health at risk of losing out on federal funding.”

The proposal would “block any federal funding for research proposals that don’t align with the Trump administration’s views,” the unions warned in a statement.

Sympathetic media coverage from the New York Times, Scientific American, and Time Magazine all parroted the same talking points.

But the reality is that federal funding has already been deeply politicized for years – by the Left, not by Donald Trump. Every presidential administration has its own priorities that it wants funded, and it has every right to fund them because the American people vested the president with that power through the ballot box. But in the case of Republican administrations, the president has had to fight an army of liberal bureaucrats looking to sabotage and undermine his priorities.

Here is the real source of the hysteria: the left is terrified that the spigot of taxpayer money for their crusade to infuse progressive ideology throughout the government and every American institution is finally being shut off. If they can no longer use the federal budget to advance their own political priorities, they lose much of their power over American culture and public life.

Consider just some of the projects funded over the years under supposedly “neutral” and “merit”-based processes.

The Biden State Department awarded $25,000 for an Ecuadorian drag show workshop, as the New York Post reported. Money also went to promoting LGBT inclusion in the Serbian workforce, an Irish DEI music festival, and three transgender clinics in India.

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent nearly $300 million on studies meant to link racism and health in Fiscal Year 2022 alone, The College Fix reported.

Other NIH spending projects include $154 million for a “false information” initiative, $661,845 on “racism and pediatric cancer care,” and $3.6 million to study “microaggressions” and “pansexual” youth.

Many of these projects no doubt came as a result of President Biden instituting his own priorities, demanding a “whole-of-government” approach to advance DEI.

The latest fight lays bare the Left's hypocrisy. They don’t have any problem with grantmaking and government funding being political, as long as it aligns with their own viewpoints. But once there is the possibility a Republican could reshape priorities and focus funding on projects that actually help Americans, not drag queens in Ecuador, the media pile-on begins.

The Left doesn’t hate the idea of a president and his appointees having power over funding – they just hate Trump and his team nixing their toxic progressive pet projects.