The Deal Was Already Signed
A president may change what Washington funds next. He should not be allowed to rewrite the terms after farmers, workers, states and communities have already relied on the government’s promise.
In December 2024, the United States Department of Agriculture signed a three-year agreement with Pennsylvania. The federal government committed more than $13 million to purchase food from local producers and move it through 14 food banks. Pennsylvania officials identified 189 farms that could participate and estimated that the program would help provide more than 4.4 million meals.
This was not a campaign proposal or an application awaiting approval. The agreement had been signed. The terms had been accepted. Farmers, food banks and state officials had been invited to plan around the federal commitment.
Then the administration changed. Three months later, the Agriculture Department told Pennsylvania that the agreement would be terminated because it no longer served the agency’s priorities. The farms had not disappeared, the food banks remained, and so did the need.
What changed was the political leadership in Washington and the government’s understanding of how much its promise was worth after a new president took office.
Pennsylvania went to court. Other states were fighting the same claimed power elsewhere: the authority to award money under one set of priorities and cancel it after a new administration adopted another.
The dispute would eventually force a federal judge to confront a question larger than one grant and one state. A president may change what Washington funds next, but can he change the terms after the deal has already been signed?
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The Promise Had Already Entered the Economy
A federal grant does not remain inside Washington once it is awarded. It enters a state budget, reaches an agency office and becomes a purchase plan, a delivery schedule, a position someone expects to keep or a service a community expects to receive.
In Pennsylvania, farmers could consider how much to grow and whether a public purchasing program justified committing land, labor or equipment. Food banks could estimate how much fresh food might arrive and how it would fit into the larger work of serving their communities. State officials had to administer the agreement, coordinate participants and prove that the money was used as promised.
The award created a chain of reliance. Washington may see one grant, but the people below it experience dozens of separate decisions. A farmer prepares a field. A food bank reserves storage. A state employee spends months building a program. A local organization directs scarce private donations elsewhere because federal support is expected to cover part of the need.
The government’s promise causes other people to make promises of their own. That does not mean public funding must continue forever. Programs end, appropriations expire, and grants may be terminated when recipients violate lawful conditions. But reliance marks the moment when a policy decision becomes someone else’s risk.
The Agriculture Department reviewed Pennsylvania’s proposal, approved the program and signed the commitment. Once the state accepted that invitation, the award no longer belonged only to a government file. It belonged to the plans made beneath it.
By the time Washington called the award a line item, someone else may already have called it a crop, a contract, a job or a meal.
The Administration Claimed a Moving Target
The administration’s argument began with a legitimate need. Agencies must be able to stop funding when a recipient commits fraud, abandons the work, violates the law or fails to perform. They also need room to respond when a project becomes impossible, or Congress repeals the authority behind it.
None of that was the dangerous part. The disputed regulation allowed an agency, under specified circumstances, to terminate an award when it no longer carried out program goals or agency priorities. The administration read that language to include priorities adopted after a grant had already been awarded.
That interpretation would give agencies more than the power to enforce an agreement. It would give them the power to change the standard by which it is judged.
A state could follow every condition disclosed when it applied, spend the money for the approved purpose, and submit every required report. A new administration could then announce a different priority and decide that the same program no longer fit. The recipient would not have failed the test; the government would have replaced the test after the recipient had already taken it.
Pennsylvania’s agreement had been approved to connect local producers with charitable food organizations. The Agriculture Department did not say Pennsylvania had abandoned that purpose. It said the agreement no longer served the agency’s priorities.
The dispute therefore moved from performance to preference. The question was no longer whether Pennsylvania had honored the agreement. It was whether the agreement still pleased the administration that inherited it.
The government’s strongest defense was flexibility. Its weakest point was notice. A recipient cannot knowingly accept a condition that does not yet exist. It cannot price the risk, revise its proposal, or decline the award. It can only discover later that the words on the page were not the only terms that mattered.
Administrative flexibility allows the government to enforce the bargain. Retroactive discretion allows the government to replace it.
The Government Wrote the Terms
Federal grants are not governed by an honor system. The government identifies the program, describes its goals, establishes conditions, and requires the recipient to document how every public dollar is used.
A state may have to submit financial reports, preserve records, follow purchasing rules and prove that the work remained within the purpose Congress authorized. An agency may withhold payments or terminate an award when the recipient materially fails to comply. The government has every right to enforce those requirements.
But grant rules impose obligations on Washington too. The termination provisions and governing priorities must be stated clearly enough for a recipient to understand what it is accepting.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani concluded that the administration’s interpretation could not be reconciled with that requirement. She found that the regulation pointed toward the goals and priorities identified when the award was made—not political standards created afterward.
That did not make a grant immune from enforcement. It made the disclosed terms matter. Pennsylvania still had to purchase qualifying food, move it through the charitable food system, account for the money, and perform the work the Agriculture Department approved. Those promises were not optional, but neither was the federal commitment.
Washington expected Pennsylvania to follow the agreement exactly while claiming the authority to end it under a priority that had not been clearly written into it. That would leave the recipient’s obligations fixed and the government’s obligations flexible.
The government wrote the terms. The terms should govern Washington too.
A Federal Grant Is Not a Presidential Favor
The money did not belong to Donald Trump, the Secretary of Agriculture, or the officials who signed the termination notice. Federal grant money is public money. Congress authorizes programs, appropriates funds, and establishes the legal purposes for which those funds may be used. Executive agencies administer awards within that framework.
The president may propose new priorities, seek different appropriations and pursue a different governing agenda, but administering public money does not make the money personal. A grant recipient does not owe political loyalty to the president. It does not receive funding as a reward for supporting his agenda, and it does not hold the award as a favor that may be withdrawn whenever its work no longer reflects his preferences.
The president inherits responsibility for administering the commitment. He does not inherit ownership of it. That is why the administration’s interpretation reached beyond ordinary grant management. Congress may have funded a program for a defined public purpose. The agency may have approved an application that satisfied every requirement. The recipient may have complied with every disclosed condition.
Yet the award would survive only if the sitting president still approved of the work. Public law would establish the program, while presidential preference would decide whether the promise remained real.
That is an Article I problem. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the legislative power, including responsibility for federal spending, because public money should not move solely according to the will of one person. The executive branch has discretion inside the law, but discretion inside a law is not the same as discretion above it.
Congress bears responsibility for the ambiguity as well. Lawmakers cannot write vague authority, surrender difficult decisions to agencies and then act surprised when presidents fill the silence with their own priorities.
When Congress gives up power, the people lose power. In this case, the loss reaches the state that accepted the award, the farmer who expected a market, the food bank that planned its supply and the family that never knew a presidential priority had entered the path between a local field and its dinner table.
Congress funded the program. The agency awarded the money. The president inherited the duty to administer the promise—not ownership of the promise itself.
Elections Change Tomorrow
A new president is entitled to govern. Elections would mean little if an administration could never redirect policy, reconsider programs, or establish different priorities from the government it replaced. A president may ask Congress to end a program, recommend different appropriations, write new lawful conditions into future grants and decline to renew awards after they expire. Agencies may still act against fraud, waste, nonperformance, illegality and impossibility.
The question is when the change takes effect. There is a difference between changing the government’s next offer and changing an agreement someone has already accepted.
Suppose an administration concludes that purchasing food from local farms is no longer the best use of future agricultural funding. It may take that argument to Congress or design a different program for the next funding cycle. States, farmers, and food banks can then examine the new terms before deciding whether to participate.
The rules may be unpopular or shortsighted, but they would be known before reliance began. Retroactive conditions deny recipients that choice. Pennsylvania could not travel back to December 2024, reconsider the agreement under priorities announced later, or decline the award before building a three-year program around it.
That is why Talwani’s ruling did not freeze federal policy. It preserved the government’s authority to establish different goals before making new awards while rejecting the claim that those goals could automatically become termination conditions for grants issued earlier.
The principle must apply regardless of party. Otherwise, federal grants become temporary political truces, and the most important condition will never appear in the documents: the program must remain politically acceptable to whoever occupies the White House.
That is not stability under law. It is government by changing permission. The presidency is an office within a continuing republic, not the beginning of a new government every four years. A president may change the offer. He should not be able to change the acceptance.
The Cancellation Notice Travels Downhill
Washington can end a grant with a letter. Outside Washington, the consequences are only beginning. Pennsylvania expected more than $13 million to move through a network of farms, food banks and public administrators. When the Agriculture Department withdrew the commitment, the state did not receive a replacement plan for the work the government had approved.
It received a hole. The state could fill it with its own money, reduce the program, ask charities to absorb more of the burden, or leave farmers without anticipated purchases and food banks without expected supply. Every choice shifted the cost elsewhere.
A farm is not a line in a federal ledger. It is a business making decisions about land, seed, equipment, labor and time. A food bank is not merely a distribution point. It is an organization estimating how many people it can serve with limited storage, transportation, staff, and donated money. A meal is not an abstract unit of performance. It is something a person expects to eat.
The same pattern appeared when AmeriCorps terminated Pennsylvania awards because they no longer served agency priorities. Twenty-six programs were affected, including work in education, veterans’ services, disaster response and community projects. The federal decision arrived as a notice; the consequences arrived as interrupted work.
A canceled federal dollar does not always become a saved public dollar. Sometimes the expense moves to a state treasury, a county, a nonprofit organization, a worker who loses wages or a family that loses a service it cannot replace. The administration’s balance sheet may show a reduction. The country’s balance sheet may not.
This does not mean every federal program must continue because ending it would be painful. Wasteful programs should be reformed or eliminated. But timing and method matter. Ending a future program through a public budget process gives communities some opportunity to prepare. Terminating an award because the recipient violated its terms places responsibility on the party that broke the agreement.
Canceling an existing award because political priorities changed places responsibility somewhere else. Washington sends the notice. The farmer, the worker, the local agency, and the family receive the consequences.
Power Should Carry the Cost of Its Own Decision
The cancellation did not eliminate the cost. It reassigned it. Good Steward Capitalism begins with a simple rule: powerful institutions should not make decisions for their own benefit while transferring the consequences to people with less power. Government should be held to the same standard.
The federal government invited Pennsylvania to participate, approved the plan, and created the conditions under which farms, food banks, and public agencies began to organize. When the administration changed direction, Washington could remove the obligation from its accounts. Pennsylvania still had to confront the hunger. The decision remained federal. The cost became local. That is the governmental form of externalization.
The Square New Deal does not demand that government preserve every program forever. It demands that public power take responsibility for the reliance it creates. Policy should change through rules that are public, predictable, and durable enough for people to organize around.
Stewardship means disclosing conditions before the award, enforcing them while the program operates, and changing future policy through new appropriations, new grant terms, expiration dates, and public legislation. It does not mean pretending that people were wrong to trust an agreement the government approved.
A state that violates a grant may lose funding and face legal consequences. When government changes its priorities, however, the people who relied on its commitment are often told that the loss is simply the price of political change.
That standard asks responsibility from everyone except the institution with the most power. Power is not responsible when it claims the freedom to change its mind and assigns everyone else the cost of believing it.
The Court Drew a Boundary, Not a Permanent Wall
Talwani did not declare that every federal grant must continue forever. She did not order agencies to ignore fraud or nonperformance, prevent Congress from ending programs, or stop presidents from establishing different priorities for future awards.
She answered a narrower question: Could the government use this termination clause to cancel an existing grant because an agency adopted different priorities after the award was made? The court said no.
Talwani concluded that the disputed language pointed to the goals and priorities attached to the grant when it was awarded. Under that reading, an agency may ask whether the recipient is still carrying out the approved purpose. Under the administration’s reading, the agency could replace that purpose after the award and terminate the grant because the recipient failed to satisfy the replacement.
The court found that the administration’s interpretation was not clearly supported by the regulation, conflicted with the wider grant system and violated the constitutional requirement that federal funding conditions be imposed unambiguously.
Nothing in the ruling prevents a president from changing future grants. The government remains free to change what it offers next. It must simply tell recipients the governing conditions before they accept the money.
That is a boundary, not a wall. The ruling did not automatically return money from grants already canceled, make every award permanent or place the issue beyond future litigation.
That limitation matters for Pennsylvania. The state’s food-program lawsuit and the multistate case before Talwani were separate disputes involving the same regulation and the same claimed authority to terminate. Talwani’s decision strengthened the legal boundary, but it did not directly reinstate Pennsylvania’s $13 million award.
The court did not say the government could never end a grant. It said the government could not hide tomorrow’s political condition inside yesterday’s agreement. The ruling protected the original bargain. It did not erase the need for Congress to protect the next one.
Congress Must Write the Rule Before Another President Tests It
The court interpreted a regulation. Congress must decide the rule. Executive power does not stop testing a boundary because one judge has drawn it. Administrations change. Agency lawyers develop new arguments. Officials invoke different statutes or insist that the next dispute is not quite the same.
Congress should establish a grant-termination standard that distinguishes recipient failure from government reversal. Agencies must retain the authority to act when a state misuses funds, abandons work, falsifies reports, or violates a lawful condition. The law should also address cases in which a program becomes illegal or impossible, but a newly adopted political priority should govern future grants unless Congress expressly provides otherwise.
Agencies should be required to identify the exact legal authority supporting a termination and state whether the recipient violated an award condition, Congress changed the law, or some other event made continued performance unlawful. “Agency priorities” should not be enough by itself.
Congress should require every material termination condition to be disclosed before an award is accepted. Recipients should receive meaningful notice, the evidence or legal change supporting termination, and an opportunity to respond. Emergency authority may sometimes be necessary, but it should be narrow, temporary and reviewable.
Public reports should also identify the award, the amount at risk, the legal basis and the obligations recipients had already undertaken. That record would force Washington to count costs that do not appear in the federal savings column: workers hired, contracts signed, state money committed and services interrupted.
Congress must also decide who carries the cost when government—not the recipient—changes direction. Should lawmakers authorize termination despite recipient compliance, the circumstances must be narrow and public, and Congress should determine whether lawful obligations already undertaken will be reimbursed.
Those decisions belong in legislation because they determine how the United States treats commitments made in its name. This is not a demand that Congress prevent presidents from governing. It is a demand that Congress govern too.
The rule must protect conservative states from retroactive conditions imposed by Democratic presidents and progressive states from retroactive conditions imposed by Republican presidents. The constitutional standard is not whose program survives. It is who had the authority to establish the terms and whether those terms were known before the recipient relied on them.
The answer to presidential discretion is not a better king. It is a functioning Congress. Repairing the republic does not mean finding a president who will use this discretion more kindly. It means writing a rule that no president may rewrite alone.
The Government Must Keep the Deal It Made
The United States invited Pennsylvania to participate. The Agriculture Department approved the plan, signed the agreement, and required the state to prove that the money was used for the approved purpose.
Pennsylvania was expected to keep its side of the bargain. So was the United States. A new president may believe the money should have been spent differently. He may ask Congress to end the program, reduce its funding, or write different lawful conditions into the next grant announcement.
Those are powers of government, but the authority to govern forward is not the authority to deny that the government already acted. The agreement was signed by the United States through an agency exercising public authority. Presidents change. The government remains.
That continuity is one of the differences between a republic and personal rule. Public commitments do not belong to the official who happened to approve them, and public obligations do not vanish when that official leaves office.
Every day, government asks people to rely on its words. It asks businesses to follow regulations written in advance, contractors to bid on public work, states to administer federal programs, and citizens to organize their lives around statutes, permits, benefits and obligations. That system cannot function if every promise carries an invisible warning that the next president may change its meaning.
Trust in government is created when the rules remain real after relying on them becomes inconvenient. A state should not be able to take federal money and ignore the conditions. A contractor should not be able to sign an agreement and abandon the work. Neither should the government be able to invite performance under one set of terms and withdraw its commitment because political priorities changed after the other side began acting. That is not special treatment. It is equal responsibility.
Congress must now write the rule clearly enough that the next administration cannot reopen the same question with another regulation, another statute, or another theory of executive power. That is government stewardship. It does not prevent change. It makes change accountable.
The Constitution comes before the president’s ideology. Durable rules come before personal discretion. Public power must carry public duties. The government demands that workers honor contracts, that businesses obey regulations, that states comply with grant conditions, and that citizens follow laws written before they acted. It cannot reserve for itself the right to change its obligations after others have relied upon them.
A federal grant is not a favor from the president. It is a public commitment made under law. The government must keep the deal it asked the people to trust.
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Sources:
“2 C.F.R. § 200.340—Termination,” Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, accessed July 26, 2026.
“Complaint, Governor Josh Shapiro et al. v. U.S. Department of Agriculture et al., Case No. 1:25-cv-00998-JFS,” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, June 4, 2025.
“Fighting for Pennsylvania Farmers: Governor Shapiro Files Lawsuit Against USDA’s Unlawful Termination of Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program,” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, June 4, 2025.
“Governor Shapiro Challenges Trump Administration’s Unlawful Decision to Cut AmeriCorps Programs That Help Communities Respond to Natural Disasters, Support Seniors and Veterans, and Keep Our Trails Clean Across Pennsylvania,” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, April 30, 2025.
“Memorandum and Order, State of New Jersey et al. v. United States Office of Management and Budget et al., Civil Action No. 1:25-cv-11816-IT,” New York State Office of the Attorney General, July 17, 2026.
“Attorney General James Wins Case Blocking Trump Administration’s Attacks on Essential Services,” New York State Office of the Attorney General, July 17, 2026.