The Trump Administration Deleted Rural.gov, So We Rebuilt It and Made It Better

How We're Fighting Back After DOGE Deleted the Tools Rural Communities Depend On

If you were a small-town mayor trying to keep your ambulance service alive or a nonprofit director patching together money for a water line, Rural.gov was one of the few federal websites that felt built for you.

At RuralOrganizing.org, we were incredibly proud of Rural.gov. We spent several months advocating for the White House to build it, and it worked.

Under the Biden administration, Rural.gov gave small-town leaders a single place to find funding opportunities, technical assistance, and programs for residents, families, homeowners, seniors, veterans, small businesses, and agricultural producers. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a solid starting point for rural communities that often didn’t have the staff and experience to compete for federal funding.

Then, when Elon Musk brought his chainsaw to Washington, it vanished. The site went back up for a few months after elected officials complained to the Trump administration, but it was deleted again in February.

What DOGE Did to Rural Communities

By deleting the site, the Trump administration raised the cost of doing basic community work, created chaos for local leaders who already wear five hats, and tilted the playing field even further toward big players who can afford lobbyists, consultants, and inside connections.

But deleting Rural.gov was just the beginning of devastating cuts from Elon Musk, now hurting Rural America. The USDA Rural Development agency has long been a critical lifeline for rural communities. Because rural areas can’t rely on private investment or philanthropy the way cities can, USDA Rural Development is often the only partner available to help local governments and small businesses get off the ground. Now, after DOGE pushed out hundreds of employees, the remaining staff is stretched thin, raising serious concerns about whether the agency can continue delivering the funding and hands-on support that rural communities depend on.

We rural Americans already know how hard it is to cobble together funds from different federal agencies, each with its own requirements, to continue vital services or boost the local economy. A badly needed water utility upgrade might involve USDA, EPA, and state revolving funds. A downtown revitalization effort might require the Commerce, Transportation, Treasury, and Interior departments. A struggling rural hospital might need HHS, USDA, and Veterans Affairs. And a small town trying to keep families from leaving has to stitch it all together with limited staff and limited time.

Introducing RuralFunding.org

That’s why we built RuralFunding.org. It’s designed to fill the gap left by Rural.gov and to do something the federal government keeps failing to do: make the rural federal funding landscape actually navigable.

RuralFunding.org is built around four goals: increasing transparency in federal funding, improving access to opportunity information, highlighting where money is actually flowing, and giving rural leaders better data to work with.

How It Works

RuralFunding.org pulls together multiple federal data sources that have never been connected in one place for rural communities:

• Grants.gov: daily updates on what funding might be available, using three search strategies so you don’t miss a deadline because a listing was buried.

• USASpending.gov: actual awards by county and program, not just what’s posted.

• Census Bureau ACS Data: county-level data on poverty, broadband access, income, and unemployment so you understand what your community is up against.

• USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes: a consistent classification system so rural places can be compared to each other, not distorted by metro county data.

• Google News Alerts: a curated list of rural programs and related news coverage so you can track what’s changing.

• A Brookings analysis of the 2019 Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance to show what laws and cabinets direct rural funding in areas such as health care, workforce development, and housing.

We also built relevance scoring to make it even easier to vet potential funding opportunities. When you select a county, each grant receives a score based on how well it targets your rural tier and how closely county conditions (like high poverty, low broadband, or high unemployment) match the program’s focus.

These scores are estimates since final eligibility always belongs to the issuing agency. But they’re enough to help rural leaders ask smarter questions and move faster with fewer resources.

The Bigger Picture

RuralFunding.org grew out of years of advocacy work at Rural Progress, a national nonpartisan nonprofit started by the founders of RuralOrganizing.org, working to ensure rural communities have the resources, voice, and federal partnership they need to thrive. Our team at Rural Progress and RuralOrganizing.org has helped secure and influence billions of dollars in federal investment for rural communities, and we’re leveraging that experience to make sure local leaders can better tap into this funding.

We know rural voters have long had reason to doubt the institutions that claim to serve them. Our polling from 2020 found that 64% of rural battleground voters believed USDA programs benefited large corporations and mega farms over small farms and small towns. That distrust didn’t come from nowhere, and it won’t get better until the federal government starts prioritizing everyday rural Americans over the ultra-wealthy.

What rural America actually needs is a coordinating body in Washington with real authority and a mandate that reaches beyond USDA — something like a National Office of Rural Prosperity with White House-level leadership. USDA matters, but it can’t be the only rural strategy when the problems span housing, education, healthcare, small-business development, and job creation across the entire federal government.

RuralFunding.org is just a start. If Washington keeps making it harder to navigate federal resources, we’ll keep building tools that make it harder for Washington to hide the ball. Our ultimate goal is to reform the federal system so it truly benefits rural communities, not just the connected few who already know how to work it.

Because Rural America deserves more than scraps and slogans. It deserves a federal government that shows up, listens, and follows through.