On August 7, 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order (EO) titled Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking. At first glance, the order is sound stewardship: it emphasizes transparency, efficiency, and accountability. It seeks to prevent federal dollars being concentrated year after year in the same institutions. It urges agencies to ensure smaller and community-based entities can access funding. And it strengthens reporting and oversight so the government can better track whether programs are delivering outcomes.
These reforms are positive overall. For many smaller nonprofits and faith-based organizations, the EO’s provisions offer hope. Often, grant systems favor large, established players with institutional wealth and grant-writing teams while grassroots organizations—closest to people’s on the ground needs—are left out. The EO’s direction to broaden partnerships and reduce redundancy could correct structural inequities that need correction.
Yet, embedded in the EO is a standard that demands deeper scrutiny. It closes with this declaration: “Every tax dollar the Government spends should improve American lives or advance American interests.” The EO requires that grants and funding opportunities align not only with agency priorities but with the undefined “national interest.”
The Risk in the Vision of “National Interest”
On its face, advancing national interest sounds uncontroversial. But what matters is how that phrase is defined and who gets to define it. As drawn in this EO and in political rhetoric, “national interest” is at risk of becoming a test of ideological loyalty rather than of public service.
A narrow interpretation of “national interest” risks treating the natural variety of human belief, worship, culture, and philosophy as obstacles rather than gifts. Under such a view, loyalty to the prevailing political ideology can quietly become a prerequisite for legitimacy in grant eligibility.
The danger is when those two sides are treated as opposed rather than as a “both/and.” True national interest does not pit political priorities against plural service. It holds them together, recognizing that the republic is sustained when government advances its goals while also safeguarding the diversity of institutions and voices that enrich our common life.
The Center for Public Justice (CPJ) clearly articulates that government’s role is not only to protect individual rights but also to make space for the rights and responsibilities of institutions. As CPJ’s Guideline on Government puts it,
“The proper exercise of governmental authority in the political community must include the legal recognition and impartial protection of human rights and responsibilities, both individual and institutional, that belong to the people and not to government.”
This is not just good policy. It is theology. God created us as relational beings, meant to live in community, not as solitary individuals cut off from one another. Families, congregations, schools, charities — these are not side projects or optional extras. They are the places where we are formed, where we learn to love, and where we practice our responsibilities to one another. When the freedom of human communities and social institutions is restricted, something of the image of God in us is also diminished.
That is why institutional rights are human rights. And this is not limited to Christians. The way of Christ is always through freedom, never through coercion. Faith can only be real if it is chosen. This is true for individual believers across every religious tradition, and for the communities they form.
It is also true for institutions shaped by secular philosophies or nonreligious commitments. They too carry responsibilities and serve the common good in ways government alone cannot. As Scripture reminds us, “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life” — a life holy and pleasing to God (1 Thess. 4:11; Rom. 12:1). Such a life of faith does not mean withdrawing from others, but engaging neighbors with respect, making room for difference, and bearing witness through service.
A church, a synagogue, or a mosque that partners with government should not have to set aside its worship, its teaching, or its convictions to qualify for funding. A faith-based nonprofit should not be pressured to quiet its deepest beliefs in order to serve. And a school, nonprofit, or community group formed by secular commitments should not be excluded so long as it lawfully fulfills its mission.
These freedoms are not favors handed down by government. They reflect the way God created us — to live in families, congregations, schools, and nonprofits that take up real responsibilities for the sake of their neighbors. Protecting their freedom ensures that these communities can keep living out that calling with integrity.
Opportunities and Challenges in Regulatory Oversight
The Executive Order does more than set a tone. It names specific steps agencies must now take. Each federal department is told to appoint a senior appointee responsible for reviewing every new grant opportunity and discretionary grant “to ensure they are consistent with the agency’s priorities and the national interest.”.
The order also requires agencies to write their materials in “plain language,” so that applicants are not disadvantaged by unnecessary technical or legal jargon. It directs agencies to coordinate more closely, so that when “duplicative or overlapping” grant opportunities appear, one can be withdrawn or revised rather than letting federal dollars be spent twice on the same need.
The EO also strengthens the government’s hand once funding is awarded. Agencies are encouraged to structure agreements so that grants may be “terminated for convenience” if projects cease to serve either agency priorities or the national interest.
There is hope in all of this. For smaller nonprofits and faith-based organizations, provisions like more clear application requirements and efforts to reduce redundancy could level a playing field that has long favored a handful of large, well-resourced institutions. By reducing unnecessary barriers, the EO holds out the possibility that local groups — often closest to the need — might finally be given a fairer chance.
But the order’s repeated invocation of “national interest” raises questions. The phrase is never defined in the text. It hangs over the new framework as both a promise and a warning: it could serve as a principle to guard the common good, or it could become a litmus test that narrows eligibility to those who match the prevailing political ideology of the moment.
Because there is no necessary tension between the government pursuing its priorities and preserving freedom for communities that do not conform in all particulars. Indeed, the strength of the Trump administration in its rise came in part from giving voice to people and institutions outside the mainstream. That same impulse could be extended: a national interest that includes commitment to freedom of religious, robust civil society, and nonconformist voices.
If implemented wisely, this EO could set standards that signal: yes, the government has priorities; yes, accountability matters; but no, those priorities will not demand surrender of institutional character.
Lessons from Alliance for Open Society
This is not the first time the federal government has blurred the line between performance accountability and ideological conformity. In 2003, Congress passed the Leadership Act authorizing PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. It included a provision requiring all organizations receiving HIV prevention funds overseas to adopt a policy “explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.”
George Soros’s Alliance for Open Society challenged the requirement, arguing that it was counterproductive and unconstitutional. They objected to being forced to affirm a particular ideological position as a condition of eligibility, not only for the funded program but for the entire organization.
Stanley Carlson-Thies, CPJ’s Senior Fellow, writing in Christianity Today in 2013, noted that while some faith-based groups supported the anti-prostitution stance in principle, they worried about the precedent. His warning was sharp:
“It is one thing for funding rules to require an alignment of purposes and effects in the services the government desires to support. But a government policy that can require private groups to commit to its ideological orthodoxy asks too much and will increasingly marginalize faith-based services.”
The concern was not about one policy stance, but about the principle of ideological litmus tests in funding. Once the government claims the right to demand conformity, it can use that power against any group whose convictions diverge from the current consensus.
The parallels to today’s Executive Order are clear. Just as the anti-prostitution pledge risked excluding organizations based on ideology rather than performance, so too the national interest standard could be used to marginalize institutions whose missions or beliefs fall outside the dominant frame. But it need not be.
Conclusion
The August 2025 Executive Order Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking includes reforms worthy of affirmation: transparency, reduction of redundancy, expanded access. These are steps toward a more just allocation of public resources.
Still, invoking “national interest” as a funding test raises serious questions. If left undefined, it risks becoming a tool of conformity, narrowing the space for diverse institutions to participate in public partnerships. While President Trump’s rhetoric has sometimes leaned toward uniformity, the EO’s framework could yet reflect a broader vision — one where the national interest includes freedom for devout institutions, dissenting voices, and communities of conscience.
The Center for Public Justice gives us the lens we need: one that understands government as responsible for public justice, accountable to citizens, and responsible for protecting both individual and institutional responsibilities. Public justice means that institutions rooted in faith, education, service, and the arts — even when nonconformist — are not liabilities, but essential parts of national flourishing.
As Stanley Carlson-Thies warned more than a decade ago, government oversteps when it requires organizations to commit to its orthodoxy as a condition of funding. That warning applies with fresh urgency today. Our public life is strongest not when all institutions look alike, but when diverse institutions live out their callings with integrity. Only then can “national interest” indeed become the covenant we hope for — a standard of justice, not conformity.
Chelsea Langston Bombino is a believer in sacred communities, a wife, and a mother. She serves as a program officer with the Fetzer Institute and a fellow with the Center for Public Justice.
