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
23
lawsuits fighting to return disrupted funds to states
as much as
$8B
being actively challenged in court
at least
$35B
of funding has been restored by court orders
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 states’ expected shares 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:
- the formal cancellation of funding a federal agency has committed to deliver under a grant award or contract for procurement;
- the freezing of funds wherein a formal cancellation does not exist, but grant and contract recipients cannot draw down funds; or
- 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.
We also track litigation arising from disruptions where the attorney general or governor of a state brings an action against President Trump, federal departments or agencies, or executive branch officials. In cases where plaintiff states seek nonmonetary relief such as an injunction, we calculate the amount under dispute for a given impact area as the aggregate of disrupted funds among plaintiff states. Where plaintiff states have specified loss amounts in their pleadings, we use those figures to calculate the amount of funding restored from litigation, otherwise we derive them from state-level estimates of funding disruptions.
Note: For the purposes of this site, states are defined as the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
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
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The administration’s federal funding disruptions affect Americans in every state. Spread the word and help others learn more.