(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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When Federal Funding Doesn’t Show Up [1]
['Bryce Covert']
Date: 2025-08-06
× Expand John Hanna/AP Photo Rocky Nichols, left, executive director of the Disability Rights Center of Kansas, and Matthew Hull, right, a Kansas resident who has cerebral palsy, speak at the center in Topeka, Kansas, June 18, 2025.
Disability Rights New Jersey is used to struggling to get the federal funding it relies on. The organization, one of the country’s 57 Protection and Advocacy Systems, or P&As, that provide legal advocacy for people with disabilities by investigating abuse and neglect and pursuing litigation on their behalf, can wait up to a month or two to get money after Congress approves a budget, particularly when it’s a stopgap measure known as a continuing resolution (CR) that extends funding from the previous year. But it always comes through, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is in touch along the way. “We never worried that once the CR happened that we would get the money,” said Executive Director Gwen Orlowski.
This year has been different. In March, Congress passed a CR for the rest of the fiscal year that ends in September, funding SAMHSA at the same level as the prior year. But Disability Rights New Jersey didn’t get any of the grant it relies on in March or April; more worryingly, there was zero communication about what was going on. There was “a real concern about whether or not we were going to actually get the fullness of the money,” Orlowski said, especially when President Trump’s leaked budget called for huge cuts to HHS.
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Orlowski made some “hard decisions” and laid off three staff members on May 1, on top of six attorneys who had left on their own. With fewer attorneys, the organization has had to change how it does intake: Instead of doing it over the phone five days a week, seven hours a day, it’s shrunk to five hours three days a week, with a fourth manned by interns. If someone calls outside of those hours, their voicemail gets deleted. Those callers used to be offered robust advice; now they’re given some phone numbers for other organizations.
The organization was even thinking about having to shutter entirely. “I don’t believe anybody has had to think about winding it down before,” Orlowski said.
On May 2, Disability Rights New Jersey received some of the money, but it was 30 percent less than what was allotted by Congress back in March. P&As across the country experienced the same thing, said Eric Buehlmann, deputy executive director for public policy at the National Disability Rights Network. Only giving out part of the money has “never been done before,” he said. So it led to a lot of “uncertainty that starts to make you question whether the funds will actually arrive or not.”
Disability Rights New Jersey received another tranche of money on June 17, but it was still $100,000 short of the full amount due. In a statement received after this article was published, a SAMHSA spokesperson said that the agency has been distributing P&A funding “on a quarterly basis” and “is currently working internally to issue the remaining funds for the fiscal year.”
Meanwhile, Trump released a proposed budget for fiscal year 2026, which starts October 1, with a more than $1 billion cut to SAMHSA funding. And HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has essentially dissolved SAMHSA, combining it with a bunch of other agencies into the new Administration for a Healthy America.
The lack of funding, plus the uncertainty about the future, means Disability Rights New Jersey essentially hasn’t taken on any new clients or work since May. That’s been the pattern across the country, Buehlmann said: The lack of full funding, plus fear about the future, has pushed P&As to take on less work and offer less help.
Disability Rights New Jersey typically offers legal representation to people in special education, receiving personal care through Medicaid, in nursing homes, or under guardianship. “What we hear from people all the time is ‘But these systems are just too complicated, I need an attorney with me,’” Orlowski said. “‘You’re going to give me a lot of advice … but what I really need is an attorney,’ and they’re right. [But] that’s the first thing that goes when we have to pull back.”
BY LAW, CONGRESS CONTROLS THE GOVERNMENT’S PURSE, determining how much funding each federal agency receives. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution says, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Congress did its work in March, telling agencies how much to send out the door to the huge universe of organizations and companies that rely on it. But as with the P&A grant money, the Trump administration has sat on billions in funding, refusing to send it out the door. According to Democrats on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, as of June 3 at least $425 billion passed by Congress hadn’t been released.
This violates the law. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which enforces the Impoundment Control Act, a 1974 law prohibiting the president from defying Congress’s appropriations, has so far found that the Trump administration illegally impounded, or withheld, funding on five separate occasions. GAO said in late July that it had 46 other investigations under way.
One of the programs illegally denied money was Head Start. HHS’s own data, GAO said in its decision, showed it had disbursed only 65 percent of appropriated grants between January 20 and April 15, compared to the same period last year. In late April, having received no funding nor any communication, Inspire Development Centers, a Head Start program in Washington state, temporarily shut down for three days, leaving 412 children without school and 74 employees without work. Even when money has finally arrived in these programs’ accounts, it’s not always for the full amount they’re due; one program in Kentucky told the Prospect that it only got half the prescribed amount for its May 1 grant with no explanation.
The Government Accountability Office has so far found that the Trump administration illegally impounded, or withheld, funding on five separate occasions.
These problems are ongoing, said Katie Hamm, who served as deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at the Office of the Administration for Children & Families under President Joe Biden. While some Head Start programs have gotten grants on time, others have told her the money doesn’t come through on time with no communication, forcing them, in some cases, to prepare staff for layoffs. “A few pop up each week that are starting shutdown procedures or are looking at closing or have closed,” Hamm said. “It is kind of chaotic.”
Besides Head Start, GAO found that the administration illegally impounded money from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an electric-vehicle grant that is part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Department of Energy’s Renew America’s Schools program, and the National Institutes of Health, where nearly 2,500 grants have been ended or delayed.
On top of those findings, the U.S. Agency for International Development barely exists; of its $120 billion in programs, just $66 billion remains. States didn’t receive money for federal child care subsidies until May 22. The administration said it was going to withhold $6.8 billion in federal funding for K-12 schools until it backtracked about a month later and said it would, in fact, release it. Money from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that goes to state health departments hasn’t been arriving on schedule, with no communication. Homelessness funding has been delayed and disrupted. Three Department of Agriculture programs for rural small businesses have gotten just 2 percent of what they’re due.
The reaction to these violations of law has been uneven, fought out on a case-by-case basis. A district court recently granted a temporary restraining order that requires the Department of Housing and Urban Development to disburse money for the Fair Housing Initiatives Program. A bipartisan group of senators has demanded that $324 million in funding for the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund be released. Last week, three Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee sent the administration a letter demanding that it release about $117 million in funding for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, following a prior letter in April.
Last week, Senate Democrats offered to allow a batch of executive branch nominees to be confirmed to their positions if the Trump administration simply followed the law and disbursed NIH and foreign-aid funding. Trump refused the deal.
In fact, Republicans in Congress have recently abetted the Trump administration’s effort to withhold money lawmakers had already approved. In July, they voted to cancel $9 billion in money for foreign assistance and public broadcasting just ahead of a deadline by which the White House would have had to release it.
The administration has indicated it plans to seek more such rescission packages to roll back funding Congress has already appropriated. But the White House has a larger strategy at play: unilaterally declaring that any funding that hasn’t been sent out by the end of the fiscal year is rescinded, and therefore expired, through what Trump’s budget director Russell Vought has called a “pocket recission.” He claims that such a move is legal; experts and many in Congress disagree.
The deliberate goal of the administration, if Vought’s past writings on the subject are any guide, is to force the Supreme Court to declare the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional, and center power over spending inside the executive branch. This would make Congress’s power of the purse only notional, and presidents more dictatorial in fiscal matters.
THE CRISIS AT THOUSANDS OF ORGANIZATIONS that depend on federal grants and contracts will only grow next fiscal year, when a new budget could deliver sharply lower appropriations levels. Even another continuing resolution could result in the same slow roll of funding.
P&As have to submit applications, including a proposed budget, by the end of September to get next year’s SAMHSA money. Yet again in this process, the Trump administration is asserting itself over Congress. Orlowski and Buehlmann said that this year, P&As have been told to submit an estimated budget based on Trump’s proposed budget, which represents a two-thirds cut in SAMHSA’s funding. Typically, P&As are told to use the previous year’s funding to apply; they’re not told to use the president’s budget request. One P&A, the Native American Disability Law Center, won’t get any funding if it drops below a certain level; Trump budgeted so little that it can’t apply for next year, Buehlmann said.
If Disability Rights New Jersey only receives a third of last year’s funding—and if it’s again doled out in dribs and drabs—then it “essentially means we can’t do any other work than the work we’ve committed to,” Orlowski said. That means only focusing on a big lawsuit it has against the state and no longer taking on clients who call in with allegations of abuse or neglect or proactively monitoring nursing homes and psychiatric wards in the state. That’s at the same time that Trump has signed an executive order seeking to force homeless people into the very institutions that P&As are tasked with monitoring.
“Now, more than ever, to not be able to fulfill our function under federal law with respect to clients with mental health disabilities is really frightening,” Orlowski said.
This story has been updated with a comment from SAMHSA.
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