DOGE’s impact in Indian Country: Nearly $470 million in lost funding

On July 4 of this year, the White House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officially shut down. Despite failing to reduce overall federal spending, DOGE—led by Elon Musk—nonetheless significantly disrupted government agencies and programs serving communities across the United States and the world. 

This analysis measures the impact of DOGE’s funding cuts on Native American Tribal nations, citizens, and communities. Previous research has shown that Tribes and Native communities have been disproportionately affected by federal funding cuts under the Trump administration. For example, a 2025 analysis by GrantExec found that “Tribal” was the most frequently flagged term in canceled grant programs, with 31% of all canceled grant programs containing the word.

We estimate that DOGE’s actions led to Indian Country losing nearly $470 million in federal funding. The most significant sources of funding losses came from cuts to environmental efforts, agriculture programs, and economic development.

These cuts matter for two reasons. First, they will have negative impacts on the well-being of Native and non-Native people and communities. Second, by cutting funding that had already been promised to Tribal nations and Native organizations, DOGE’s actions violate federal trust and treaty obligations to Tribes.

Methodology

As The New York Times and others have reported, Elon Musk and DOGE inflated the headline numbers on federal spending reductions on the official DOGE website. To mitigate that challenge, this report cross-references DOGE’s self-published numbers with de-obligations data from USAspending to validate whether cuts that DOGE claimed credit for actually took place. We reconcile these transaction-level data with obligation records from USAspending’s account-level dataset, which is subject to more stringent robustness checks and records de-obligations more reliably than the transaction data alone.

To determine which awards were going to Native American Tribes and organizations, we then geocoded awards and grants to recipient location and filtered to include only recipients located in the U.S. Recipients were tagged as American Indian/Alaska Native under the following conditions:

• Recipients were classified as one or more entity types pertaining to Tribes or other Native-owned organizations, including (but not limited to): “Native American Tribal Government,” “Tribally Owned Firm,” “American Indian Owned Business,” “Native American Owned Business,” and “Indian Tribe.” We used entity classifications from each recipient’s current USAspending profile and from historical bulk grant data to account for changes to the classification taxonomy over time.
• Recipients were classified as a government entity other than a state or national government agency, and operated primarily on Tribal land (defined through census-delineated Tribal block groups).
• Recipients had names and/or identifiers matching third-party datasets of known Tribal entities, such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) Tribal Leaders Directory and the Department of Education’s database of minority-serving institutions (including Tribal colleges and universities).

We make special exceptions in the data for colleges and universities classified as Native American-Serving Nontribal Institutions (NASNTIs) and Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions (ANNHs), which are picked up in our identification procedure but receive the majority of their federal funding for purposes unrelated to Native causes (such as medical school research and campus improvements). Therefore, we classify awards to NASNTIs and ANNHs as Native-serving only if they had at least one Native sub-awardee.

Other awards were also flagged as Native-serving if more than half of their sub-award funding was being channeled through Native organizations. However, documented challenges with USAspending’s collection and validation of sub-award data make it impossible to definitively identify the amount of this sub-award funding that was potentially impacted by DOGE.

We looked at de-obligations reported during the period DOGE was operating, from the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2025 through the end of FY 2026. In total, we were able to confirm through USAspending that DOGE cancelled a total of 1,597 grants and contracts affecting Tribes and Native organizations, totaling $468.7 million in de-obligated funding.

This analysis is limited to measuring the impact of grant and contract cancelations implemented by DOGE. As such, it does not include 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 and downsizings. These actions nonetheless had significant impacts on Indian Country. As one example, the BIA-managed Haskell Indian Nations University saw more than a quarter of its staff get cut due to DOGE-mandated layoffs—a development that Dalton Henry, the interim president of school’s board of regents, said would “have disastrous consequences for fulfilling its educational mission”

As such, DOGE’s total impact on Indian Country is higher than this analysis can calculate, and is likely to have lasting negative impacts for years to come.

Native Americans lost a greater share of funding from DOGE actions than non-Native recipients

In total, we find that DOGE canceled nearly $470 million worth of grants and contracts going to Native American Tribes and organizations. This accounted for roughly 6.5% of all DOGE funding cuts that we were able to confirm using de-obligations through USAspending.

Notably, the share of DOGE cuts affecting Indian Country was significantly higher than Native Americans’ share of the U.S. population. While estimates vary, the most recent numbers from the Census Bureau show that Native Americans account for between 1% and 2.7% of the U.S. population. This means that DOGE’s cuts impacted Tribal nations, citizens, and communities at a rate two to six times higher than their share of the population.

Funding to Native American Tribes and organizations was also more significantly affected by DOGE than funding to non-Native organizations. We find that Tribes and Native organizations lost 12.1% of obligated funding under awards canceled by DOGE, compared to just 8.3% for non-Native recipients.

One of the factors leading Native-serving awards to be more significantly impacted by DOGE actions may be that federal funding awards made to Tribes and Native organizations tend to have more unspent funding than awards to non-Native entities. As research by Brookings and others has shown, Tribes face more significant barriers to accessing and spending down federal funding than other groups. These barriers can contribute to them drawing down federal funding awards at slower rates than non-Native organizations, which left more funding vulnerable to DOGE cuts.

DOGE cuts harmed Tribes’ environmental, agricultural, and economic development efforts

Funding cuts to Tribes and Native organizations largely centered on programs related to pollution abatement, climate resilience, and building agricultural economies. USAspending classified over 65% of all Indian Country grants and contracts canceled by DOGE as Natural Resources and Environment, while another 11% were classified as Agriculture.

Within the Natural Resources and Environment subject area, the most significant sub-function was Pollution Control and Abatement, which singlehandedly accounted for over 61% of all funding DOGE cut in Indian Country.

For example, DOGE terminated a roughly $20 million Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Community Change award for the Alaska Native village of Kotzebue to build and independently own two wind turbines. The Tribe planned to generate energy locally and use revenue to fund Tribal programs and essential community needs such as water and sewer improvements and economic development initiatives. Kotzebue is partially reliant on external sources of diesel fuel to meet its energy needs, and the project would’ve supported energy grid reliability and independence. Other terminated awards included funding for the Nevada Clean Energy Fund and the Walker River Paiute Tribe to implement a multi-year climate resilience plan, as well as funding for a river stabilization project that would enable the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk to remain on its ancestral land.

While USAspending classifies these funding streams as Natural Resources and Environment or Agriculture, many also focused on Tribal economic and workforce development. For example, the Chippewa Cree Tribe on Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana lost $6 million that was meant to purchase a piece of reservation land for young farmers to manage. Similarly, the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in South Dakota planned to use a roughly $2 million award to create a revolving fund to help prospective farmers purchase property. These types of investments would have helped these Tribes bolster their agricultural economies.

Meanwhile, Piikani Lodge Health Institute planned to use a nearly $9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program to build an industrial community kitchen and producer training hub on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Launched under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the program aimed to support underserved and young producers through grants and cooperative agreements with local governments, nonprofits, and Tribes for technical assistance, land, and market access projects. The training hub would have supported 300 Native and non-Native farmers and ranchers in Glacier and Pondera counties. 

As these examples show, DOGE’s funding cuts directly harmed the ability of Tribes to develop healthy, self-sustaining economic opportunities for their citizens and communities.

DOGE’s funding cuts in Indian Country also affected distinct subject areas and agencies compared to cuts affecting non-Native communities and organizations. Cuts in Indian Country affected a significantly higher share of natural resources and environment funding (65%) than DOGE cuts overall (40%). This also meant that more than half of all awards and contracts to Native/Tribal recipients cancelled by DOGE were funded by the EPA, compared to just over 20% for non-Native recipients.

Conversely, only about 5% of DOGE cuts in Indian Country were related to health, compared to 18% of DOGE cuts overall. The higher prevalence of health-related cuts among non-Native recipients is largely reflective of cuts to pandemic-era public health funding, such as grants and contracts awarded for state-level public health agencies, infectious disease research, and vaccine production.

Tribes and Native organizations in the West and National Capital Region saw the largest DOGE cuts

Geographically, Western states with significant Native populations generally saw higher Native-focused funding cuts from DOGE, though states in the National Capital Region also saw elevated levels of funding cuts—likely due to the number of national Native nonprofits located there. The states with the most Native-focused funding de-obligated by DOGE were Alaska, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

In order to better illustrate how smaller Tribes and states with smaller Native American populations were affected, this analysis also assesses which states lost the greatest share of their obligated funding through DOGE cuts. In order words, in which states did DOGE-affected Native funding recipients lose the highest percentage of the federal funding awarded to them?

We calculate that in 12 states, DOGE grant and contract cancellations resulted in Tribes and Native nations losing more than half of the funding obligated to them under affected awards. This included more than 90% of obligated Tribal and Native organization funding in Oregon, and more than 80% in Rhode Island and Michigan.

What DOGE’s cuts mean for Tribal governments and the US-Tribal relationship

Beyond its impacts on Tribal economies and the environment, DOGE cuts will have significant impact on Tribal government capacity. And while much attention has been paid to DOGE’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, the U.S.-Tribal relationship is a political relationship, not one based on race or ethnicity. To that end, DOGE’s cuts to Indian Country violate U.S. trust and treaty obligations to Tribal nations, citizens, and communities.

DOGE cuts have impacted the government’s obligation to provide services to Tribal governments and Tribal citizens, including health care and food systems. Reno Keoni Franklin, chair of the California Rural Indian Health Board, described DOGE “closing down facilities or limiting the amount of staff that can be hired at each one,” and warned, “It sounds like this is going to be a trickle-down effect; it’s not. It’s a tidal-wave effect. It happens instantly.”

In Nevada, former Elko Band Council chairperson Leah Brady described the potential closures in her community as akin to the U.S. government breaking a treaty to provide health care.

DOGE also directed USDA to cut $500 million from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. This gutted a program that, as the First Nations Development Institute writes, “supports local and regional food systems by purchasing food from historically underserved producers and distributing it to communities facing food insecurity.” These cuts come despite the U.S. government’s federal responsibility to support Native food systems being “grounded in treaties, federal law, and the trust responsibility.”

Last year, Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said about DOGE: “They need to know, come up to speed real quick, on what treaty rights and trust responsibility means.”  Wizipan Garriott, the Interior Department’s former principal deputy assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, told Tribal Business News that the cuts created “a lot of confusion on multiple levels” as to whether trust obligations will be honored. And as Louise Matson, executive director of the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis, described it: “You don’t know when or if future payments will keep your programs alive.”

The violations of trust and treaty obligations go beyond funding. For example, DOGE’s actions have also undermined Tribes’ treaty-bound hunting and fishing rights. Among the offices DOGE targeted was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office that provides the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho with technical and scientific support for wildlife management on their reservation land. In an interview with High Country News, Wes Martel, who served on the Eastern Shoshone Business Council and was the chairman of the Tribe’s Fish and Game Committee, said that in light of DOGE’s actions, “Most of the trust relationship we’re talking about doesn’t exist, especially now.”

Some of DOGE’s action were met by lawsuits joined by Tribes and Native organizations. For example, a federal judge in South Carolina ruled the termination of the EPA’s nearly $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program illegal, but did not order the agency to reissue funding following a class action lawsuit filed by a coalition of nonprofits, local governments, and the Alaska Native Village of Kipnuk. In another example from this June, a judge granted a preliminary injunction ordering the USDA to reinstate $127 million in Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access awards following a case led by 2020 Farmers Co-op and joined by the Four Bands Community Fund (a Native community development financial institution) and others.

How to safeguard Native funding from future interference

Moving forward, new policy is needed to ensure these types of indiscriminate funding cuts cannot happen. To do so, policymakers can take several steps.

First, Congress should shift more funding for Indian Country to formula funding rather than relying on competitive grants. Doing so would solve two problems. First, it would reduce opportunities for agencies to meddle with or rescind funding because it doesn’t align with an administration’s preferred political priorities. Second, it would move the U.S. away from making Tribes and Native organizations compete with one another for resources that are owed to Tribes in exchange for the land they ceded to the United States.

A shift to formula funding would create its own new implementation challenges, including changing how agency staff award funding, ensuring that formulas are adequately funding Tribal communities, and ensuring that Tribes have the capacity to receive new funding.

Current levels of federal appropriations are inadequate to provide full formula funding to every Tribe. Given that, competitive grants can help agencies direct funding to Tribes and Native organizations that are—in the eyes of the awarding federal agency—most prepared to receive and spend the money. Competitions also help grants from getting diluted to the point where they are too small. However, this also means that many Tribes get left out of federal funding streams entirely.

Without adequate funding levels, a shift to formula funding could create new legal challenges about funding formulas and whether Tribes are getting their fair share of federal dollars. To ensure that formula funding can adequately meet the needs of Tribal nations, citizens, and communities, Congress should pair shifts to formula funding with greater use of mandatory funding. Doing so would ensure that programs won’t run out of money as they serve a greater number of Tribes, Native people, and Native communities. Making greater use of mandatory funding in critical trust and treaty obligation areas such as health care, public safety, and education would also help mitigate chronic underfunding in those areas.

Congress should also make greater use of upfront payments rather than relying on the standard reimbursement model when funding programs that serve Indian Country. Because many smaller or less resourced Tribes and Native organizations have relatively low levels of cash on hand, they cannot readily access federal awards that operate based on reimbursements. Moreover, when they do, they may not be able to quickly draw down funding accounts, leaving them more vulnerable to political meddling, as was seen with DOGE. Paying Tribes and Native organizations upfront rather than relying mostly on reimbursements would address these problems.

These changes to funding policy could result in some Tribes receiving funding that they may not currently have the capacity to immediately use. Without adequate technical assistance, this could exacerbate issues that Tribes face with spending down federal awards they receive. To that end, any shifts to federal funding must also be paired with technical assistance for Tribes to hire and train new governmental staff, as well as support for federal agencies themselves to be able to assist Tribes as needed.

Recognizing that these policy changes are substantial and make take years to implement, in the near term Congress should pass a law clearly defining that all federal funding to Tribal nations, citizens, and communities is in service of U.S. trust and treaty obligations, even if it comes through a program with another statutory purpose. Recognizing that there are currently relatively few protections for Tribes when the federal government violates its trust and treaty obligations, Congress can strengthen this law by passing provisions that explicitly prohibit the termination of grants to Indian Country because they “no longer effectuate agency priorities,” as was the stated justification for many of DOGE’s funding cuts, including those in Indian Country.

Congress should also enact new laws that require federal agencies to reissue grants to Tribes or Native organizations in instances where funding cuts or contract cancellations are found to be illegal, to prevent situations such as the South Carolina-EPA case mentioned above.

Conclusion 

While DOGE did little to change the overall trajectory of federal government spending, it had significantly disruptive effects for communities across the U.S. and worldwide. As this analysis shows, DOGE’s actions had a disproportionately negative impact on Indian Country. 

In addition to disrupting Tribal agriculture, economic development, and climate adaption, these cuts violate U.S. trust and treaty obligations to Tribal nations, citizens, and communities. Moving forward, policymakers should enact new policy safeguards to ensure these types of arbitrary and destructive funding cuts to Indian Country cannot happen again.