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States are fighting back in court.

Chaotic funding cuts have caused damage across the country. States are working to restore promised federal money that Americans are counting on.

27 states have joined lawsuits against the administration to return disrupted funds.

Joined at least one lawsuit

Lawsuits aren’t the only tool.

States are also restoring funding through direct pressure—public campaigns, appropriations fights, and appeals to agencies.

Health

After roughly 2,900 grantees got behavioral health grant termination notices, pressure from providers and elected officials helped restore nearly $2B in grants in 24 hours.

The New York Times

Education

Ten GOP senators, 32 Senate Democrats, and 150 House Democrats urged OMB to reverse a freeze on $6.8B in K-12 funding and the administration released the funds a month later.

Education Week

Energy

A bipartisan group of U.S. House members successfully secured the release of roughly $3.7B in heating aid for states and Tribal communities.

CT Mirror

Methodology

All content on Lost Funds is based on publicly available data.

The primary source for grant award amounts is USAspending. Litigation information is pulled directly from court documents available via CourtListener. Expected funding figures are drawn from the strongest evidence available. We rely on award announcements when we can, falling back to agency budgets, Congressional appropriations, and historical trends. If we have only national funding levels for an impact, we estimate each jurisdiction’s expected share using historical spending when possible, supplemented by program-specific allocation factors like population or highway miles.

We catalog a disruption when one of the following has occurred:

  1. the formal cancellation of funding a federal agency has committed to deliver under a grant award or contract for procurement;
  2. the freezing of funds wherein a formal cancellation does not exist, but grant and contract recipients cannot draw down funds; or
  3. a slowdown in the pace of grantmaking as measured by the number of new awards issued or fewer dollars obligated or outlaid under awards compared to previous years.

We identify funding disruptions using a variety of signals, including agency communications, directives from the administration, media coverage, litigation filings, and direct submissions.

Note: For the purposes of this site, states are defined as the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We also track funding disruptions in the U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands) and in the freely associated states (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau), which receive federal funding under Compacts of Free Association with the United States.

How to cite the data:
Clawson, J., Kaczmarek, U., Ross, N., Scott, E. R., Shan, M., Mairson, E. & Delaney, S. (2026). Lost Funds: A States United and Grant Witness Project Tracking Funding Disruptions under the Trump Administration [Dataset]. Accessed {access date}. https://lostfunds.org

Download full dataset

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The administration’s federal funding disruptions affect Americans in every state. Spread the word and help others learn more.