DHS terminated 362 grants and pulled back about $1 billion in 2025. GAO found some disaster-mitigation projects delayed by nearly a year — and the department taking the same approach again without writing down what it learned.
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A February 2025 executive order directed agencies to consult the U.S. DOGE Service and review grants for termination within 30 days. GAO's September 17 report on what followed at the Department of Homeland Security: all obligated grant disbursement paused in February 2025, then 362 grants terminated and about $1 billion deobligated across four DHS components, plus new requirements imposed on remaining recipients. GAO found the approach 'made it difficult to execute grant programs' — some disaster mitigation projects were delayed by nearly a year. The recommendation is not that the terminations were wrong. It is that DHS is continuing to take similar actions and has not incorporated what this round taught it.
Terminating a grant is a decision. Pausing every grant while you decide is a
different thing, and it is the part with a cost nobody books.
What happened, in order
GAO's sequence:
In February 2025, the President issued an executive order that called for
agencies to consult with the U.S. DOGE Service (also known as the Department
of Government Efficiency) to review and terminate grants within 30 days of the
executive order to reduce spending.
Then, at DHS: "DHS paused the disbursement of all obligated grant funding in
February 2025." And: "With approval from the Secretary, four DHS components
terminated 362 grants and deobligated" about $1 billion.
Obligated funding is money already committed to a specific recipient for a
specific project. A pause on disbursement does not cancel the commitment; it
stops the cheque while the work is under way.
What it cost, in GAO's words
We found that DHS's approach to these actions made it difficult to execute
grant programs. For example, some disaster mitigation projects were delayed by
nearly a year.
Disaster mitigation is the category where a year of delay has a specific meaning:
it is a hurricane season, or a wildfire season, spent with the work unfinished.
The recommendation
Notably, GAO does not recommend reinstating anything or second-guessing which
grants were chosen. It recommends learning:
DHS continues to take similar actions but hasn't incorporated lessons learned
from this original approach into its recent efforts. We recommended that DHS do
so before taking future actions.
An agency doing the same thing a second time, having documented what went wrong
the first time, is a fixable problem. An agency doing it a second time without
having written any of it down is not yet even a problem anyone can point at.
