Granted Research
How little federal grant money reaches charities directly
The federal government obligated $1.19T in grants in fiscal year 2024. Of that, only $72.0B — 6.0% — went directly to 501(c)(3) public charities. The overwhelming majority, 84%, flowed to government entities, led by state Medicaid agencies. Colleges took about 4.1%. For an organization that thinks of “federal grants” as money for nonprofits, the direct charitable slice is far thinner than it looks — and in FY2024 it was inflated by a single one-time program.
Key finding. In FY2024, just $72.0B of the $1.19T in federal grant dollars — about 6.0% — went directly to 501(c)(3) public charities, according to a Granted AI analysis of USAspending award records (net obligations, fiscal year Oct–Sep).
Last verified July 2026.
$72.0B
To 501(c)(3) charities
FY2024, direct grants
6.0%
Of all grant dollars
of $1.19T total
84%
To governments
chiefly state Medicaid
13.2%
Charity share ex-Medicaid
of the non-Medicaid economy
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<iframe src="https://grantedai.com/research/federal-grants-to-charities/embed" width="100%" height="420" style="border:1px solid #e5e7eb;border-radius:12px" title="Only 6% of federal grant dollars reach charities — Granted AI" loading="lazy"></iframe>Where the $1.19T went
Every FY2024 federal grant dollar, grouped by the kind of organization that received it. Each award is assigned to one sector from its USAspending recipient-type tag (government wins over college, college over charity). “Government” is dominated by state Medicaid agencies, which pass the money on to providers and beneficiaries.
| Recipient sector | Net obligations | Share | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government | $1.00T | 84.0% | States, cities, counties, tribes — chiefly Medicaid |
| 501(c)(3) charities | $72.0B | 6.0% | Public charities that are not colleges or governments |
| Other / unclassified | $50.1B | 4.2% | Recipients with no distinguishing type tag |
| Higher education | $48.8B | 4.1% | Public & private colleges, HBCUs, HSIs |
| For-profit & small business | $17.7B | 1.5% | Companies and small businesses |
| Nonprofits without 501(c)(3) | $2.0B | 0.2% | Non-charitable nonprofits |
| Individuals | $218.0M | 0.0% | Grants to individuals |
Net obligations, fiscal year Oct–Sep, derived from award action dates. Figures net in-year deobligations; the positive-only total is $1.26T. Sectors are mutually exclusive, so shares sum to 100%.
The Medicaid problem with the denominator
One program dominates the whole picture. Medicaid alone (CFDA 93.778) accounted for $646.8B — more than half of all federal grant dollars — and effectively none of it reaches charities directly; it is a formula grant to state health agencies. Strip Medicaid out, and the grant economy charities actually compete in is $544.9B. Against that denominator the direct charitable share more than doubles.
Charity share of all grant dollars
6.0%
$72.0B of $1.19T
Charity share excluding Medicaid
13.2%
$72.0B of $544.9B
Both figures are FY2024 net obligations. The same recomputation for FY2025 gives 3.4% of all dollars and 8.1% excluding Medicaid.
The FY2024 spike was a one-time event
Direct grants to charities hovered around $36.9B–$43.9B a year, then nearly doubled to $72.0B in FY2024 before falling back to $42.5B in FY2025. Almost the entire bulge is one program.
The $20.0B green banks. In FY2024 the EPA obligated the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — the $20.0B climate “green bank” created by the Inflation Reduction Act — to a handful of nonprofit coalitions. The two national funds (66.957 and 66.960) alone put $20.0B into 501(c)(3) recipients such as Climate United Fund ($7.0B) and the Coalition for Green Capital ($5.1B). That single act of grantmaking is roughly a quarter of the entire FY2024 charitable slice — and it is not a recurring program.
A January sprint, then a February freeze
The FY2025 monthly pattern tells the rest of the story. Charity obligations peaked at $7.5B in January 2025, then collapsed to $863.1M in February — a 89% drop in a single month as new grant activity froze.
Net charity obligations by calendar month, FY2025 ($ billions). Gold = the January peak; red = the February collapse.
What fell, and what rose
The FY2025 pullback was not evenly spread. International and humanitarian charity funding fell hardest, while a domestic clean-energy program for rural electric cooperatives more than doubled.
| Charity sub-sector | Program | FY2024 | FY2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| International affairs (USAID + State) | CFDA 98.xxx + 19.xxx | $6.9B | $2.2B | −68.7% |
| USAID overseas programs | CFDA 98.001 | $4.0B | $981.5M | −75.7% |
| Refugee admissions (State) | CFDA 19.510 | $735.2M | $186.8M | −74.6% |
| Food programs | CFDA title “food” | $1.0B | $391.6M | −61.1% |
| Refugee resettlement (HHS/ORR) | CFDA 93.566 | $1.2B | $2.0B | +70.8% |
| Rural electric co-ops (NEW ERA) | CFDA 10.758 | $1.8B | $4.4B | +142.5% |
Net charity-slice obligations by named program, FY2024 vs FY2025. “International affairs” sums USAID (CFDA 98.xxx) and State Department (19.xxx) programs; USAID 98.001 and refugee lines are also shown individually. HHS refugee resettlement (ORR, 93.566) rose even as State-run refugee admissions collapsed.
Who the top “charities” actually are
The 15 largest recipients of direct charitable grants in FY2024. The list is topped by climate-finance nonprofits created to hold the green-bank money, and it includes hospitals and rural electric cooperatives — organizations that are legally 501(c)(3)s but not what most people picture as “charities.”
| # | Recipient | State | Net grants | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Climate United Fund | MD | $7.0B | Other charity |
| 2 | Coalition for Green Capital | DC | $5.1B | Other charity |
| 3 | Opportunity Finance Network | PA | $2.3B | Other charity |
| 4 | Power Forward Communities | MD | $2.0B | Other charity |
| 5 | Inclusiv | NY | $1.9B | Other charity |
| 6 | Miscellaneous foreign awardees | WA | $1.0B | Other charity |
| 7 | Southwest Key Programs | TX | $945.9M | Other charity |
| 8 | Justice Climate Fund | DC | $940.0M | Other charity |
| 9 | Hoosier Energy Rural Electric Cooperative | IN | $676.8M | Electric cooperative |
| 10 | Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative | MI | $651.6M | Electric cooperative |
| 11 | Catholic Relief Services (USCCB) | MD | $640.0M | Other charity |
| 12 | The General Hospital Corporation (Mass General) | MA | $619.6M | Hospital / health system |
| 13 | Henry M. Jackson Foundation for Military Medicine | MD | $618.9M | Other charity |
| 14 | National Center for Manufacturing Sciences | MI | $591.7M | Other charity |
| 15 | National Fish and Wildlife Foundation | DC | $531.4M | Other charity |
Hand-tag check (top 100 recipients). We manually classified the 100 largest FY2024 charity recipients. 13 are hospitals or health systems ($2.8B) and 3 are electric cooperatives ($1.8B). Excluding the hospitals, the direct charitable slice is $69.1B — still about 5.8% of all federal grant dollars. The hand-tagged list ships in the CSV.
The FY2025 gainers are co-ops, not classic charities. The fastest-growing “charity” line in FY2025 was the USDA’s New Empowering Rural America (NEW ERA) program for rural electric cooperatives, which rose from $1.8B to $4.4B — a $2.6B increase. Nonprofit hospitals held roughly flat. The classic direct-service charity is a minority of even this small slice.
Even the charity slice is top-heavy
In FY2025, 17,014 distinct 501(c)(3) charities received a direct federal grant. But the money is highly concentrated: the largest 171 of them — the top 1% — captured 47.2% of all charitable grant dollars.
17,014
Charities funded
FY2025, direct grants
47.2%
Held by the top 1%
171 charities
40.2%
Held by the top 100
0.6% of recipients
0.89
Gini coefficient
1.0 = total concentration
Concentration is measured over the full FY2025 charity-recipient universe by net obligations; the Gini coefficient clamps net-negative recipients to zero (a standard treatment for obligations data).
How this compares with earlier estimates
Direct federal grants to charities are rarely measured. The Government Accountability Office last put a number on it around 2009, estimating roughly $25 billion in direct federal grants to nonprofits on FY2006 data — about 5% of grant funding, a share strikingly close to what we find nearly two decades later.
The larger and more familiar figures — the Urban Institute and Candid have reported $240–304 billion a year in government funding to nonprofits — measure something different and broader. Those come from nonprofits’ IRS Form 990 filings and count all government money: federal, state, and local grants plus pass-through dollars (a state spending federal Medicaid money at a nonprofit clinic) and fees for service (Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements). This study measures only the narrow slice a nonprofit can pursue as a direct federal grant, which is why the number is an order of magnitude smaller.
What the numbers show
The headline is easy to misread, so it is worth stating carefully. The federal government moves more than a trillion dollars a year through the grant system, but most of it is not “grant funding” in the sense a nonprofit means. 84% of it goes to units of government, and the single largest line by far is Medicaid — a formula program that routes federal dollars through state health agencies. Those agencies do not keep the money; they pay it out to hospitals, clinics, and beneficiaries. High government share here reflects how federal assistance is structured, not who ultimately benefits.
Set the structural money aside and the picture for charities is still sobering. Even against a grant economy with Medicaid removed, direct grants to 501(c)(3) public charities were only 13.2% in FY2024 — and that was the high year. FY2024 was inflated by the $20.0B Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a one-time Inflation Reduction Act program obligated to a few climate-finance nonprofits. Strip that out and the underlying charitable slice sits close to where it has been for years, around $43.9B.
An honest caveat. The biggest recent gainers inside the charitable slice are not classic direct-service charities. In FY2024 it was climate green banks; in FY2025 it was 501(c)(3) rural electric cooperatives, whose NEW ERA obligations rose by $2.6B, plus nonprofit hospitals. These organizations are genuinely tax-exempt charities, but a food bank or a youth-services nonprofit reading these totals should not assume the money is aimed at organizations like them. It largely is not.
For the nonprofit sector the practical lesson is twofold. Direct federal grants are a smaller, more concentrated, and more volatile funding source than the trillion-dollar top line implies — the top 1% of charity recipients take 47.2% of it, and a single fiscal year can swing it by tens of billions. And the money that is reachable is easy to miss inside the noise of Medicaid and pass-through spending. The full methodology and the reconciliation are below.
Methodology & sources
- Data source
- Federal financial-assistance (grant) awards from USAspending.gov, as mirrored in Granted’s
federal_awardstable. Recipient type comes from the USAspendingbusiness_typestag; recipient identity from the SAM.gov Unique Entity ID, falling back to a normalized recipient name. - Fiscal year (Oct–Sep, by action date)
- Every figure derives the fiscal year from each award’s action date (FY = year + 1 if the month is October or later). We do not use the recipient feed’s labeled fiscal-year field, which mislabels early-October activity into the prior year. FY2024 = action dates from 2023-10-01 through 2024-09-30.
- The “charity slice” definition
- Each award row is placed in one mutually-exclusive sector by precedence: any government tag makes it government; otherwise any higher-education tag makes it higher education; otherwise a “NONPROFIT WITH 501C3 IRS STATUS” tag makes it a charity. The charity slice is therefore a pure 501(c)(3) public charity that is neither a college nor a unit of government. A row can carry several tags; precedence prevents double-counting.
- Net obligations (and the positive-only total)
- Dollar figures are net obligations — the sum of
federal_action_obligation, which nets in-year downward adjustments. The FY2024 net grand total is $1.19T; the positive-only total (ignoring deobligations) is $1.26T. Measured on the positive-only basis, higher education is $50.4B rather than the $48.8B shown net. - Concentration and Gini
- Recipient concentration is computed over the full FY2025 charity-recipient distribution (17,014 recipients) by net obligations. The Gini coefficient clamps net-negative recipients to zero, a standard treatment for obligations data that can go negative; the positive-only Gini is 0.86.
- Hand-tagged recipients
- The 100 largest charity recipients are manually classified as hospital / health system, electric cooperative, or other. Electric cooperatives are identified by name and by participation in the NEW ERA program (CFDA 10.758), because several (e.g. Great River Energy) carry no co-op word in their name. The full tagged list is in the downloadable CSV.
- Reproducibility & reconciliation
- Every number on this page is produced by a committed analysis script (
scripts/research-studies/federal-grants-to-charities/analyze.py), which prints the verbatim SQL and a reconciliation table. Independent cross-checks: FY2024 charity = $72.0B (≈$72.0B); government share = 84.0%; the FY2021–FY2025 charity series reconciles to within ~1.5%; GGRF = $20.0B. See our data methodology for how Granted sources and maintains this data.
Related research
- What happened to federal grants to charities in FY2025? — the year-over-year change, month by month, with GGRF and hospitals separated out.
- Federal grants to charities, year by year — how stable the charity share is across administrations, FY2019–FY2025.
- The charities that receive the most federal grant money — the top-100 recipients in each view, with every exclusion shown.
Free to cite and republish with attribution to Granted AI (grantedai.com/research/federal-grants-to-charities) under CC BY 4.0. Questions or corrections: nathan@grantedai.com.