Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

5. Department of Homeland Security · Notable

Require E-Verify registration and use as a condition of DHS grants

Not started

137 5. Department of Homeland Security

“Certification by applicants that they are both registered with E-Verify and using E-Verify in a transparent and nonevasive manner.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Read the document, and the clause is not in it. The DHS Standard Terms and Conditions is where a grant-wide E-Verify certification would live, and four editions were fetched and read in full on 2026-09-03: the FY2025 original (2024-10-22), FY2025 Version 2 (2025-03-27), FY2025 Version 3 (2025-04-18) and the FY2026 edition effective 2026-04-16. **"E-Verify" returns zero hits in every one of them**, and zero in the 192,000-character FY2025 Homeland Security Grant Program notice of funding opportunity. The department did rewrite these terms inside the window, and it rewrote them around something else: Version 2 added a *Communication and Cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Officials* section requiring certification under penalty of perjury that the recipient will honor immigration detainers and comply with 8 U.S.C. §§ 1373 and 1644 (see #288). Action on the ask's object — DHS grant certifications about immigration compliance — that does not reach this ask, so the current terms are attached here as adjacent Evidence under §3b rule 4. The nearest thing to a verification requirement anywhere in the grant documents is the NOFO's election-security condition, which requires the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system to be used to confirm the citizenship of poll workers, with 3 percent of the award withheld from drawdown until compliance is confirmed. SAVE for poll workers is not E-Verify for grantees. The government-wide E-Verify mandate the Mandate also wants is tracked separately as #336.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Instrument sought: a DHS grant condition requiring applicants to be registered with and using E-Verify.

Searched, in the federal records we keep (fetched 2026-08-28): presidential documents, final rules, proposed rules and notices in the Federal Register, filtered to DHS and its components; bills in Congress and public laws, from congress.gov; White House presidential actions; and federal court dockets (CourtListener), including the bulk snapshot of 1.2 million dockets. No rule, notice or presidential action imposing an E-Verify condition on DHS grants was found. USCIS’s E-Verify Federal Register activity in the window is confined to information-collection renewals (2026-04-16, 2026-05-13, 2026-05-18, 2026-06-26, 2026-08-19).

  • The department’s grant terms were read, 2026-09-03. The DHS Standard Terms and Conditions page opens and lists every edition back to FY2016 with dates and PDF links; the PDFs open too, as does the FY2025 Homeland Security Grant Program funding notice. This converts a “could not read the page” negative into a “read the page, in four consecutive editions, and the clause is not there” negative, which is as strong as this ask’s negative can get on the department’s published terms. It does not reach unpublished award-specific conditions attached to an individual grant.

  • Unified Agenda, 2026-09-01. DHS’s full Unified Agenda (the 2026 agenda, 59 RINs) was read at reginfo.gov rather than the abbreviated Federal Register version. No DHS RIN mentions E-Verify. The only entry that reaches DHS grant conditions at all is RIN 1601-AB23, Revisions to Subtitle B of Title 2 on Federal Financial Assistance, DHS/OS, Proposed Rule Stage, whose abstract names transparency, accountability, oversight, indirect-cost policy and burden reduction. Its NPRM has already published — DHS joined the government-wide Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance of 2026-05-29 (2026-10817), which carries no E-Verify condition — so the Status here comes from that published proposal and not from the agenda, and it does not change. Subject area, not this ask’s object. https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=1601-AB23

  • EO 14332 and agency grants (2026-09-29). Executive Order 14332 (2025-08-07) puts every agency’s funding announcements and discretionary awards under senior-appointee review and a test of the President’s priorities. Under the rule we settled on 2026-09-29, it counts only where an ask’s object is review, clearance or priority-alignment of an agency’s awards. This Quote’s object is an E-Verify certification. The FY2026 DHS Standard Terms add the order’s termination and drawdown terms (#420) and still carry no E-Verify term. Status unchanged.

Action
restrict
Object
DHS grant eligibility (E-Verify certification)
ID
289