Kevin Abourezk
ICT
President Donald Trump’s 18-month effort to cut federal spending, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, led to $469 million in cuts to grants and contracts for tribal communities, according to a report by Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research and policy organization.
“A variety of leaders in Indian Country have talked about the very abnormal way that these funding cuts happened, in many cases without any consultation with tribal leaders,” said Robert Maxim, Mashpee Wampanoag and a fellow with Brookings. “There have been several instances where these funding cuts have been found by courts to be illegal, and so it really does undermine the trust relationship that the federal government has with Indian Country.”
Previous studies have shown that DOGE’s funding cuts disproportionately affected tribal communities, including a 2025 analysis by GrantExec that found that “Tribal” was the most frequently flagged term in canceled grant programs, with 31 percent of all canceled grant programs containing the word.
Much of DOGE’s funding cuts to tribal communities came to programs focused on environmental efforts, agriculture and economic development, the Brookings study found. About 65 percent of DOGE cuts came from natural resources and environmental grants and contracts, and another 11 percent were classified as agriculture, according to the Brookings study.
An example of one such environmental program funding cut made by DOGE was that of a nearly $20 million grant to the Alaska Native village of Kotzebue to build two wind turbines that would have allowed the village to generate its own electricity and use revenue from the sale of that energy to fund essential community needs such as water and sewer improvements and economic development initiatives.
The study’s authors struggled to determine how much tribal communities lost to DOGE cuts as the Trump administration has been shown to have inflated federal spending reductions, according to the New York Times. To address this issue, Brookings cross-referenced DOGE’s self-published numbers with spending reductions identified by USAspending, a government-sponsored federal spending reporting website, in order to validate whether reported DOGE cuts actually took place.
The study’s authors found that DOGE canceled 1,597 grants and contracts affecting tribes and Native organizations. Those cuts accounted for about 6.5 percent of all DOGE funding cuts, far outpacing the population of Native Americans in the country, which varies between 1 and 2.7 percent according to Census figures.
In addition, tribes and Native organizations lost 12 percent of funding under awards canceled by DOGE, compared to just 8 percent for non-Native recipients. One reason may be that tribes and Native organizations that receive federal funds struggle to spend those funds in a timely manner compared to non-Native or -tribal recipients, in part because they often struggle to spend federal funds on a reimbursement basis as they often lack cash on hand and they often struggle to acquire federally required matching grant funds.
“They may have more difficulties spending the money upfront so they draw down awards at a lower rate and all of those factors left funding for Indian Country much more vulnerable to these cuts than funding for non-Native organizations,” Maxim told ICT.
The report, however, does not attempt to quantify the impact of federal government employees who lost their jobs because of DOGE actions, nor does it calculate the impact of federal office or agency closures.
As one example of how federal layoffs in February 2025 affected Indian Country, Haskell Indian Nations University – which is operated by the Bureau of Indian Education – lost more than a quarter of its staff and forced the university to cancel classes and seek private funds to maintain operations.
The federal government provides nearly $30 billion a year to tribes, so the DOGE cuts amounted to slightly less than 2 percent of those funds. Much of those lost funds had been targeted toward environmental programs, especially those focused on addressing climate change and investing in clean energy.
The lack of tribal consultation has led tribes to sue the federal government over the cuts and has led to several courts ruling against the federal government over the DOGE cuts, including a federal judge in South Carolina who ruled that the termination of a $3 billion Environmental Protection Agency block grant program was illegal but did not order the agency to reissue the funding. The ruling came as the result of a class action lawsuit filed by a coalition of nonprofits, local governments and the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk.
Maxim said courts simply are unable to force the federal government to reissue canceled funding so they often decline to even try.
The Brookings study recommended that Congress pass a law shielding Indian Country from future funding cuts that are based on political whims and also force federal agencies to reissue funds when courts decide those funds were cut illegally.
“Indian Country prepaid for this (funding) in the land and the lives that tribes lost over the course of U.S. history,” Maxim said. “And so now the U.S. maintains an obligation to support tribes through funding, and as a result I think there’s a big question about whether Indian Country can take the U.S. at its word and a lot of its funding obligations that it makes to us.”
Calls to the White House press office seeking comment on the report were not immediately returned.
