in effect
This is Executive Order 14222, signed February 26, 2025, and published in the Federal Register on March 3, 2025. It directs federal agencies to build tracking systems and review their spending on contracts, grants, and loans as part of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) cost-cutting initiative. It applies to “covered contracts and grants” — discretionary spending on contracts, grants, loans, and similar instruments — while excluding direct assistance to individuals and spending tied to immigration enforcement, law enforcement, the military, public safety, the intelligence community, and other critical or emergency needs.
Each agency must build a central technology system that records every payment on covered contracts and grants along with a short written justification from the employee who approved it, with those justifications posted publicly to the extent practical and permitted by law. Agencies have 30 days to review all existing covered contracts and grants (prioritizing money going to educational institutions and foreign entities for waste, fraud, and abuse) and to review their contracting policies and personnel, during which they generally cannot issue new contracting officer warrants. Agencies must also set up a system logging written justifications for federally funded non-essential and conference travel, and all employee credit cards are treated as frozen for 30 days except for disaster relief and other critical uses. On real property, agencies must confirm an accurate real-estate inventory within 7 days, identify lease termination rights within 30 days, and the General Services Administration must submit a disposal plan for unneeded government-owned property to OMB within 60 days.
Executive branch agencies and their heads, employees, and DOGE Team Leads carry out the new tracking, justification, review, and reporting requirements; the order does not cover the Executive Office of the President. Contractors, grant recipients, loan recipients, and lessors of government property may see contracts and grants terminated, modified, or renegotiated, with educational institutions and foreign entities flagged for priority review. The order explicitly excludes law enforcement officers, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the uniformed services, classified information systems, and anything an agency head exempts in writing, and it states it creates no legally enforceable rights.