In a stunning display of legislative tunnel vision, a bipartisan subcommittee tasked with drafting federal guidelines for transgender participation in youth sports accidentally zeroed out all federal funding for organized school athletics nationwide — due to what sources are calling “an Excel sorting error and too many hot takes.”

The incident occurred during the 117th meeting of the Federal Task Force on Fairness, Athletics, and Gender Expression in Youth (FTF-FAGEY), which has been meeting biweekly since 2019 and has, until now, produced only a single PowerPoint slide titled “We’ll Get Back To This.”

The funding cut, which totaled $1.3 billion in youth athletic grants, was accidentally embedded in page 842 of the committee’s report titled “Preliminary Considerations on Definitions of Competitive Cohesion.” The report was passed without being read by any of the members — a tradition upheld since the Carter administration.

“We were so focused on making a statement about fairness that we forgot to fund the actual sports,” said Rep. Gil Wymack (R-AR), who co-chaired the subcommittee and once described himself as “a huge fan of compromise and dodgeball.”

What Was Defunded?

The accidental defunding impacts a wide array of programs, including:

• Public school athletic programs in all 50 states

• The National Youth Bocce League (a Department of Agriculture project)

• The Federal Unified Sports Accessibility Grant, which supported inclusive team sports equipment

• A pilot program called “Ball is for All”, which had just launched an adaptive Quidditch league in three rural counties

All of these programs were wiped from the budget after a single ambiguous clause was inserted:

“All non-essential physical youth activities subject to gender-based eligibility disputes shall be suspended until further standardization of competitive norms.”

The clause was originally intended as a placeholder.

Officials Blame “Document Drift”

Federal auditors confirmed the clause was likely pasted from a working Google Doc into a master spreadsheet, then back into Word, where it was formatted in “stealth italics” — a formatting bug known to render entire funding sections legally invisible.

“It’s a classic case of Document Drift,” said OMB spokesperson Cheryl Wen. “Honestly, it’s a miracle this government functions at all.”

Political Fallout: Everyone’s Mad for Different Reasons

Progressives criticized the committee for incompetently penalizing all young athletes, while conservatives accused the committee of trying to “sneak in radical inclusionism through bureaucratic typos.”

Meanwhile, the President issued a statement calling the error “unfortunate,” and blamed it on a “complex interdepartmental coordination misfire,” which sources confirm is code for “we accidentally gave this assignment to unpaid interns again.”

In a rare joint press conference, Senators Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren both slammed the decision — for completely opposite reasons — before immediately getting into a shouting match about whether Ultimate Frisbee is a sport or a coastal hobby.

Emergency Replacement Program Proposed: “Let Kids Stand Still”

In response to public backlash, the Department of Education has announced a temporary stopgap initiative: the Stationary Physical Engagement Program (SPEP), which provides funding for:

• Meditative stretching

• Chair-based sports documentaries

• “Competitive Standing” (currently unregulated at the federal level)

• A new online training module called “Becoming Winded: A Virtual Experience”

The White House says they hope to restore real athletic funding “as soon as we can figure out which committee did this and whose cousin they were trying to hire.”

Until then, all youth sports have been federally reclassified as “improvised cardio gatherings with disputed legality.”

Local school districts have been advised to “run in place” until further notice.