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A DOGE engineer removed users’ access to grants.gov, threatening to further slow the process of awarding thousands of federal grants per year.

U.S. DOGE Service employees have inserted themselves into the government’s long-established process to alert the public about potential federal grants and allow organizations to apply for funds, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive situation.

The changes to the process — which will allow DOGE to review and approve proposed grant opportunities across the federal government — threaten to further delay or even halt billions of dollars that agencies usually make in federal awards, the people said. The moves come amid the Trump administration’s broader push to cut federal spending and crack down on grants that DOGE and other officials say conflict with White House priorities.

DOGE employees have made changes to grants.gov, a federal website that has traditionally served as a clearinghouse for more than $500 billion in annual awards and is used by thousands of outside organizations, the people said. Federal agencies including the Defense, State and Interior departments have historically have posted their grant opportunities directly to the site. Nonprofits, universities and local governments respond to these grant opportunities with applications to receive federal funding for activities that include cancer research, cybersecurity, highway construction and wastewater management.

But a DOGE engineer recently deleted many federal officials’ permissions to post grant opportunities, without informing them that their permissions had been removed, the people said. Now the responsibility of posting these grant opportunities is poised to rest with DOGE — and if its employees delay those postings or stop them altogether, “it could effectively shut down federal-grant making,” said one federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations.

Agency officials have been told that the grants.gov site has been under systems maintenance. They have been instructed to email their planned grant notices to grantreview@hhs.gov, an inbox at the Department of Health and Human Services that is being monitored by DOGE, the people said.

About 5,000 notices of funding opportunities are typically posted on grants.gov each year, with more than 10 million visitors to the site, according to people with knowledge of its operations. Some federal agencies have been able to post grant opportunities, known as Notice of Funding Opportunities or NOFOs, but the vast majority rely on grants.gov, the people said.

HHS — which has typically posted more than 1,000 grant opportunities per year, the most of any government agency — has long managed the site.

In a written statement, HHS said that the agency was “taking action to ensure new grant opportunities are aligned” with administration priorities, such as ending the chronic disease epidemic and focusing on its Make America Healthy Again agenda.

“NOFO’s at HHS have, and will continue, to be posted,” according to the statement.

Staff at the National Institutes of Health have separately been informed that DOGE will have new authorities to review and approve NOFOs issued by the biomedical agency, according to an NIH employee and meeting records obtained by The Washington Post.

NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has taken multiple steps to delay or halt federal grants, such as delaying billions of dollars in research grants issued by agencies such as the NIH, and freezing or terminating grants to higher-education institutions on the grounds that the universities did too little to combat antisemitism on campus, did too much to support transgender athletes or for other, indeterminate reasons. The grant cancellations have prompted lawsuits from affected organizations and frustrations inside federal agencies.

Current and former federal officials characterized DOGE’s new authorities over grant opportunities as part of its effort to take control of federal IT systems. The agency — which is backed by billionaire Elon Musk and stocked with young engineers and his allies — has used its perch over federal databases and personnel offices to issue sweeping changes to government programs, sometimes with little advance notice to colleagues, according to career civil servants and some Trump officials.

“If DOGE is going to sign off on NOFOs, it’s a big expansion of their responsibilities,” said Robert Gordon, who served as the HHS assistant secretary of financial resources during the Biden administration. “NOFOs set criteria for making grants, the rules of the game … and if DOGE chooses not to sign off on NOFOs, money can’t get spent, and it is effectively impounded.”

The Trump administration has publicly confirmed that DOGE was given some authority over the grants website. Luke Farritor, a DOGE engineer, was granted access to grants.gov on March 21 and had been made an administrator of the system, according to a Trump administration court filing on March 29 related to a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s authority to access federal data.

The decision to allow Farritor access to the grants system and other databases followed an executive order “to identify waste, fraud, and abuse and to modernize government technology and software to increase efficiency and productivity,” the filing read. “Mr. Farritor has not modified, copied and shared with any unauthorized users, or removed any records from any of these systems.”

A DOGE engineer last week wrote a script to disable federal users from posting to grants.gov, without providing any advance notice to the users, said two of the people with knowledge of the team’s activities. DOGE also set up the new grantreview@hhs.gov inbox and separately deleted the permissions of many users this week, the people said.

Farritor — who was a University of Nebraska student before he dropped out to become a fellow at the Thiel Foundation last year — did not immediately respond to emails sent to his HHS, NIH and personal email addresses requesting comment. HHS did not respond to questions about Farritor’s work.

Some Trump officials said they had been unaware of DOGE’s plans to remove users’ access to grants.gov, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. Federal officials had urged DOGE to instead ask the White House to formally announce a pause on NOFOs, rather than pursue a backdoor effort to limit postings, according to two of those people.

Pressure on NIH grants

Within NIH, staff have spent the past month fine-tuning the details of a new system for publishing NOFOs.

All new notices soliciting grants have been paused at NIH since January after a Trump administration communications freeze for all health agencies. The NIH website shows that the last funding opportunity was published Jan. 22. Trump officials have said that they need time to review grants that were issued under the Biden administration and get their new team in place.

In late March, staff who help write and post NOFOs across the NIH attended a meeting at which leaders said the agency would soon resume publishing funding opportunities — but that DOGE would now be involved in the process. “Modifications to the workflow,” read contemporaneous meeting notes obtained by The Post: “anticipating DOGE will have final say on what NOFOs can go out (discussions ongoing with HHS).”

An NIH memo last week also called for staff to begin developing and submitting “forecast reports” of any proposed NOFOs for approval, “at least 6 months prior to the desired NOFO publication date,” according to the memo, which was obtained by The Post.

Staff who work on grants attended a meeting this week at which leaders gave yet another update on how DOGE will be reviewing NOFOs. For NOFOs with “concept clearance,” approval for the final posting must be obtained from the office, center or institute director and the NIH director, as well as DOGE reviewers, according to contemporaneous meeting records obtained by The Post.

NOFOs that do not have such clearance will have to go before the NIH director and DOGE representatives twice — once to approve the forecast report, and once to approve the final NOFO, per the meeting records. And any NOFO dealing with a “controversial topic” will require additional approval from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, according to the records.

Staff leading the discussion said they had no idea how long all these new requirements would ultimately delay the grant process, the meeting records show.

“I don’t know how to best describe how angry I am about this,” said one NIH employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.