Terminating a grant is a decision. Pausing every grant while you decide is a different thing, and it is the part with a cost nobody books.
What happened, in order
GAO's sequence:
In February 2025, the President issued an executive order that called for agencies to consult with the U.S. DOGE Service (also known as the Department of Government Efficiency) to review and terminate grants within 30 days of the executive order to reduce spending.
Then, at DHS: "DHS paused the disbursement of all obligated grant funding in February 2025." And: "With approval from the Secretary, four DHS components terminated 362 grants and deobligated" about $1 billion.
Obligated funding is money already committed to a specific recipient for a specific project. A pause on disbursement does not cancel the commitment; it stops the cheque while the work is under way.
What it cost, in GAO's words
We found that DHS's approach to these actions made it difficult to execute grant programs. For example, some disaster mitigation projects were delayed by nearly a year.
Disaster mitigation is the category where a year of delay has a specific meaning: it is a hurricane season, or a wildfire season, spent with the work unfinished.
The recommendation
Notably, GAO does not recommend reinstating anything or second-guessing which grants were chosen. It recommends learning:
DHS continues to take similar actions but hasn't incorporated lessons learned from this original approach into its recent efforts. We recommended that DHS do so before taking future actions.
An agency doing the same thing a second time, having documented what went wrong the first time, is a fixable problem. An agency doing it a second time without having written any of it down is not yet even a problem anyone can point at.