I was very closely watching the saga of OMB’s disastrous effort to freeze funding for a vast number of federal programs, and wrote about why it was actually revoked at New York.
This week the Trump administration set off chaos nationwide when it temporarily “paused” all federal grants and loans pending a review of which programs comply with Donald Trump’s policy edicts. The order came down in an unexpected memo issued by the Office of Management and Budget on Monday.
Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge. Adding to the pervasive confusion, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately insisted on Wednesday that the funding freeze was still on because Trump’s executive orders on DEI and other prohibited policies remained in place. But there’s no way this actually gets implemented without someone, somewhere, identifying exactly what’s being frozen. So for the moment, it’s safe to say the funding freeze is off.
Why did Team Trump back off this particular initiative so quickly? It’s easy to say the administration was responding to D.C. district judge Loren AliKhan’s injunction halting the freeze. But then again, the administration (and particularly OMB director nominee Russell Vought) has been spoiling for a court fight over the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act that the proposed freeze so obviously violated. Surely something else was wrong with the freeze, aside from the incredible degree of chaos associated with its rollout, requiring multiple clarifications of which agencies and programs it affected (which may have been a feature rather than a bug to the initiative’s government-hating designers). According to the New York Times, the original OMB memo, despite its unprecedented nature and sweeping scope, wasn’t even vetted by senior White House officials like alleged policy overlord Stephen Miller.
Democrats have been quick to claim that they helped generate a public backlash to the funding freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded:
“A Monday night memo from the Office of Management and Budget ordering a freeze in federal grant and loan programs sent congressional Republicans scrambling and helped Democrats rally behind a clear anti-Trump message. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Trump as ‘lawless, destructive, cruel.’
“D.C. senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, warned that thousands of federal programs could be impacted, including veterans, law enforcement and firefighters, suicide hotlines, military aid to foreign allies, and more …
“During a Senate Democratic Caucus lunch on Tuesday, Schumer urged his colleagues to make the freeze “relatable” to their constituents back home, a clear play for the messaging upper hand. Schumer also plans on doing several local TV interviews today.”
In other words, the funding freeze looks like a clear misstep for an administration and a Republican Party that were walking very tall after the 47th president’s first week in office, giving Democrats a rare perceived “win.” More broadly, it suggests that once the real-life implications of Trump’s agenda (including his assaults on federal spending and the “deep state”) are understood, his public support is going to drop like Wile E. Coyote with an anvil in his paws. If that doesn’t bother Trump or his disruptive sidekick, Elon Musk, it could bother some of the GOP members of Congress expected to implement the legislative elements of the MAGA to-do list for 2025.
It’s far too early, however, to imagine that the chaos machine humming along at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will fall silent even for a moment. OMB could very well issue a new funding-freeze memo the minute the injunction stopping the original one expires next week. If that doesn’t happen, there could be new presidential executive orders (like the ones that suspended certain foreign-aid programs and energy subsidies) and, eventually, congressional legislation. Democrats and Trump-skeptical Republicans will need to stay on their toes to keep up with this administration’s schemes and its willingness to shatter norms.
It’s true, nonetheless, that the electorate that lifted Trump to the White House for the second time almost surely wasn’t voting to sharply cut, if not terminate, the host of popular federal programs that appeared to be under the gun when OMB issued its funding freeze memo. Sooner or later the malice and the fiscal math that led to this and other efforts to destroy big areas of domestic governance will become hard to deny and impossible to rescind.
Right-Wing lies and propaganda? Say it isn’t so! Horror of horrors! Yeah, there’s alot of angry Democrats on the rampage and it’s about time we had a common cause to rally behind. It appears that the pendulum is beginning to swing to the left, but Democrats need to stay politically engaged and become pro-active to prevent this slide into fascism.
Sad that they had to tilt the poll to make Bush appear to be moving up in the polls. Why cant the press just report the facts. Fact is that GW is dropping in just about every poll that is taken. The trend is downward …not upward!
The more I think about this, the more I think this is a serious, serious SCANDAL.
Its very difficult to believe that between Kohut, Campbell, and the NYT fact checkers, that this “mistake” is not at least partially due to anti-liberal/pro-Bush bias. This is precisely the kind of bullshit that always leads to people thinking that Republicans are much more popular than they really are. The Washington Post has been whoring for Bush on poll numbers as well.
I’m sick of hearing people make purely the a priori argument that it is ridiculous to think that allegedly liberal papers like the New York Times would be biased against liberals. How many times do we have to get screwed before the pattern becomes clear?
If any of you fucking weasels at the Washington Post or the New York Times reads this:
FUCK YOU
We are sick of your shit and we are coming after you this time. No more of your bullshit like around impeachment, or Al Gore, or the Florida debacle, or Bush’s tax cuts, or the Iraq War, or WMD, or Howard Dean, or Wesley Clark, or Bush’s poll numbers.
We will EXPOSE your asses mercilessly. Your reputations will be DESTROYED. No more Ceci Connolly’s.
FUCK YOU
Angry? You bet your ass I’m angry. And you know what? I don’t need your fucking permission to be angry. How come you’re not angry? Answer: because you’re a bunch of fucking weasels.
FUCK YOU
Well, if there’s one thing about Kohut, he will always be there to support the conventional wisdom. The last thing he would ever want to do is make anyone uncomfortable with his poll results. He trades on his insider status and thus has to reinforce whatever most people are saying or want to hear said, particularly those in leadership positions — who of course are Republicans.
It’s shameful, it reminds me of Ruy and Clark’s polls!
That should say everyone else was in the 30s.
It’s pretty amusing this story appeared in the N.Y. Times the same day the CBS N.Y. Times poll showed Bush dropping from 60 to 50 percent in less than a month. BTW, Bush’s disapproval of 45 percent is the highest at this point in their presidencies of any president from Carter on. And it’s not even close. Clinton was at 40 percent dispproval and everyone was in the 30s.
Thanks, Ruy, for that post. I was shocked to see Kohut’s name on that piece of pro-Bush PR. I mean, I expect nothing less than partisan spin from a lot of the “straight-news journalists” at the WaPo and the NYT (it turns out that their reporting of their own poll was much more pro-Bush than either CBS’ report or the Washington Times! — see Atrios). But I really thought Pew was one source that could be trusted. Oh well.
It would be nice to see a systematic comparative study of how newspaper headlines/ledes described similar poll movements for Bush v Clinton v Dean etc.
Both the Wash Post and the NYT regularly give Bush the best possible spin on his numbers. People who work at those papers, like Richard Morin and Claudia Deane at the Post, should be ashamed of themselves.
Why would you expect them to stick to the facts? When their data showed that Gore won Florida they crafted a headline that said the exact opposite.
As Bartcop says, they bow down and kiss the ground for the almighty ditto-monkey dollar.
I have a dumb question: Is there any measurable effect in the polls when the media reports a candidate is rising/falling in popularity?
In other words, are poll ratings self-fulfilling?