The Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking Executive Order (EO) released by the White House on August 7, 2025 lays out new guidelines on how grant funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) will be monitored and released, how federal grant applications will be evaluated, and how federal grants will be awarded through the administration’s lens of “agency priorities and the national interest.”
Several of the proposed regulatory requirements and administrative processes outlined in the EO are already mandatory.
What follows is a breakdown of the proposed changes.
Proposed Changes to Grant Funding Opportunities
Per the EO, each grantmaking agency head will appoint a senior appointee who will be responsible for creating a process to review new FOAs and to review discretionary grant awards to ensure consistency with “agency priorities and the national interest.
According to the EO, this new review process does not guarantee any level of review or consideration to funding applicants except as consistent with applicable law.
The senior appointees (and/or their designees) will conduct an annual review to ensure adherence to the new proposed FOA review and award selection process.
The new process will:
- Involve coordination with the Office of Management and Budget, an office within the Executive Office of the President.
- Require that new grant FOAs are reviewed by designated subject matter experts (SMEs) when possible and appropriate.
- Result in FOAs and forms that are simplified, in plain language, and minimize the need for legal and technical expertise in drafting an application.
- Aim to reduce redundancy by cross-checking with other agencies to see if the FOA has already been addressed by another agency.
- Ensure subject matter expert review to be undertaken for scientific research discretionary grants by a grant review panel, federal official or outside expert review
- Include a “pre-issuance” review of discretionary awards via in-person or virtual discussions that will now include the senior appointee or his/her designee. Note that many research grants already includes this process. The difference is that now the review will include the senior appointee.
- Ensure that FOAs will not be issued without prior approval from the designated senior appointee.
- Allow senior appointees to use their independent judgement; they do not need to ratify or defer to the recommendations of others.
NOTE: In many instances, federal SMEs are involved in the creation of the FOAs. In addition, new “plain language” and streamlined FOA standards were already outlined in the published 2024 revisions of Uniform Guidance. Finally, subject matter expert review is currently part of the review process for scientific research discretionary grants. See NIH and CDC websites describing the peer review process for more details.
Proposed Changes for New Federal Grant Awards
Below is a list of additional proposed changes for the application review and the awarding processes.
- How applications will be evaluated and scored.
- Proposed changes to award terms, including attempts to make termination for convenience or similar provision the standard in all federal grant terms and conditions.
- The White House’s definition of Gold Standard Science, and
- Proposed changes to Uniform Guidance.
It should be noted that grant application evaluations or scoring rubrics will now include whether the proposed project “demonstrably advances the President’s policy priorities.”
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