Federal grants to charities, year by year

What the numbers show

The striking thing is how little the charity share moves. Over seven fiscal years it ranged from 2.4% (FY2021) to 3.7% (FY2024) — a spread of just 1.2 percentage points. There is a gentle upward drift, but no lurch at any change of administration. The line you might expect to jerk around with each new set of White House priorities instead behaves like a structural constant: whatever else changes, a low-single-digit share of federal grant dollars reaches charities directly.

Two years look like exceptions, and neither really is — each is a lesson in reading the numerator against the denominator. In FY2021 the share dips to 2.43%, its lowest point. That is not charities losing ground; it is the denominator ballooning. Pandemic relief pushed total federal grant obligations to a record $1.31T that year, so even though charities’ dollars rose (to $31.9B, up from $28.2B the year before), their slice of a much bigger pie got thinner.

FY2024 is the mirror image — a numerator distortion. A one-time $22.3B from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — climate money the EPA routed to a handful of nonprofit “green banks” ($14.0B to the National Clean Investment Fund alone) — would push the charity slice to 5.5% of all grants if we left it in. Strip that single program out and FY2024 sits at 3.65%, right in line with its neighbors. Because GGRF was a one-time capitalization that did not repeat — the same CFDAs net to essentially zero in FY2025 — the headline series removes it, so a genuine trend is not mistaken for a permanent step up. The most recent year, FY2025, comes in at 2.93% ($36.3B), off the FY2024 peak, in a year that itself spans a change of administration.

The same across administrations

The seven years map onto three presidencies. FY2019 and FY2020 fall under the first Trump administration; FY2021 straddles the January 2021 handoff to the Biden administration, which covers FY2022 through FY2024; and FY2025 straddles the start of the second Trump administration. The presidency changed party twice inside this window — in January 2021 and January 2025 — yet the charity share tracked a smooth path across both handoffs. Grant obligations are recorded on the date the money was committed, so these windows reflect when each administration was actually obligating funds.

Why the series starts in 2019

We begin the trend in FY2019 for a data-quality reason, not an editorial one. USAspending only records a recipient’s organization type (the tag that tells us whether a grantee is a government, a university, or a charity) once the DATA Act took full effect in mid-FY2017. In FY2017 about 51.9% of grant dollars carry no recipient type at all, and in FY2018 about 12.7%; from FY2019 on it is effectively 0%. Splitting charities out of years that are half-untagged would produce a made-up number, so FY2017–FY2018 are shown in the coverage table below as flagged lower bounds and left out of the headline series entirely.

A benchmark from 2009

The last time anyone put a comparable number on this was nearly two decades ago. In GAO-09-193 (February 26, 2009), the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that federal agencies made about $25 billion in direct grants to nonprofit organizations in fiscal year 2006 — by our arithmetic against total grant spending of that era, on the order of 5 percent (the GAO itself published no share). That is not a like-for-like match with ours: the GAO counted all tax-exempt organizations, including the universities and hospitals we set aside, and it drew on FY2006 data. But the order of magnitude lines up — a low-single-digit share of federal grant dollars reaching nonprofits directly — which is part of what makes the steadiness over the years since notable rather than surprising.

One clarification for anyone comparing figures: this is a much narrower measure than the widely cited Urban Institute / Candid numbers, which put government grants to nonprofits at roughly $240–304 billion a year. Those come from what nonprofits themselves report on IRS Form 990 and include state and local grants and federal money passed through state agencies; we count only federal prime awards obligated directly to a 501(c)(3), which is a small slice of that larger total.

So the answer to whether the charity share moves administration to administration is: not really — not at this altitude. The direct-to-charity slice is structurally about 3.1% of all federal grant dollars, or 4.1%–8.1% once you set aside the Medicaid pass-through, and it stays there no matter who holds the White House. The movement — which programs, which causes, which organizations — happens inside that slice, not in its size. Our companion studies open it up: an overview of grants to charities, the FY2024-to-FY2025 comparison, and the largest charity recipients. The full methodology, exclusions, and the reconciliation to the official USAspending totals are below.