I was very closely watching the saga of OMBâs 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 âpausedâ all federal grants and loans pending a review of which programs comply with Donald Trumpâs 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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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 Trumpâs executive orders on DEI and other prohibited policies remained in place. But thereâs no way this actually gets implemented without someone, somewhere, identifying exactly whatâs being frozen. So for the moment, itâs safe to say the funding freeze is off.
Why did Team Trump back off this particular initiative so quickly? Itâs easy to say the administration was responding to D.C. district judge Loren AliKhanâs 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 initiativeâs government-hating designers). According to the New York Times, the original OMB memo, despite its unprecedented nature and sweeping scope, wasnât 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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded:
âA 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 âlawless, destructive, cruel.â
âD.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 âŚ
âDuring a Senate Democratic Caucus lunch on Tuesday, Schumer urged his colleagues to make the freeze ârelatableâ to their constituents back home, a clear play for the messaging upper hand. Schumer also plans on doing several local TV interviews today.â
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 presidentâs first week in office, giving Democrats a rare perceived âwin.â More broadly, it suggests that once the real-life implications of Trumpâs agenda (including his assaults on federal spending and the âdeep stateâ) are understood, his public support is going to drop like Wile E. Coyote with an anvil in his paws. If that doesnât 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.
Itâs 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 doesnât 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 administrationâs schemes and its willingness to shatter norms.
Itâs true, nonetheless, that the electorate that lifted Trump to the White House for the second time almost surely wasnât 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.
NEWSWEEK/TIME POLLING IS A JOKE.IT MAY AS WELL BEEN DONE BY THE RNC.38%REPUBLICANS WERE POLLED,31%DEMOCRATS AND 31%INDEPENDENT.THAT IS DICTATING AN OUTCOME.
It excludes the indigent who don’t have internet access or email accounts. Although, most of them are probably more likely to vote for Kerry anyway…
The only surprise here is Iowa — for Bush?
Isn’t it more likely for Dems to have internet?
I doubt it. Isn’t the Internet more likely to be used by the more wealthy, and doesn’t that mean Republicans?
Like xdog and John Mcc, I’m on Zogby’s email polling list.
xdog gave a good description of what we see when we respond.
I’ll note, as I have a couple times previously on this board, that the answer options to the Zogby question on party identification don’t include the Democratic party. Instead, Zogby lists that mythical dittohead creation, the “Democrat” party.
I’ve emailed several zogby contact names several times on the error, with no respons. This last time, I included a Google search URL for “Democrat party” on rushlimbaugh.com.
I’ll be curious to see if the error is corrected in the next poll. Maybe I accomplished nothing more than getting my email removed from the list.
Gore’s speech is getting news airtime. MoveOn might want to replay it in its entirety to take advantage of the publicity. CNN played a decent soundbite of it this morning.
Pelosi, Gore. The language of condemnation is getting stronger. What is needed is a Republican voice to speak as strongly along the same lines so as to take the partisan onus off the words. Of course, anyone who did so would be immediately ostracized from the GOP, but then if Zel Miller can shill for the GOP, someone in the GOP can find enough integrity to call Bush out on his ineptitude. I think it would have to be a CA Republican. There’s got to be a CA Republican with a liberal enough constituency who could make this move without putting his seat too much on the line.
I just finished watching Al Gore’s speech at NYU on the C-span. Wow! It was a beaut. Gore hit Bush about as hard as anyone has.
I hope Move-on.org which sponsored the event finds a way to play it again and again over the next few weeks. It will really help Kerry. Its the kind of surrogate help that Kerry has needed.
If you check out the National Council on Public Polling’s website (www.ncpp.org/poll_perform.htm) you will see that in the 2000 election the closest results were from, believe it or not: Harris Interactive!! Harris Interactive, if I’m reading the results correctly, came closer than any other pollster (including Zogby and CBS) except maybe the regular Harris polling. Maybe there is something to this interactive polling.
xdog – I’m no pollster, but from my understanding of probability, it’s not a factor of 2, but of squareroot(2) =~ 1.41
You’re right angry moderate. I see that happen all over the place, but am a bit suprised to see it here.
Ruy – Ohio isn’t outside the MOE. Aren’t you supposed to double the reported MOE for two-person contests because the MOE is for each individual number, i.e. +/-3 for Kerry individually and Bush so margin would have to be over 6 to be 95% certainty that Kerry is leading. I’ve read this in numerous places including an SSRC guide to interpreting polls so assume it must be true. Did you let down your guard here?
I’ve participated in Zogby on-line polls for a couple of years. He leads with a few questions to determine past voting preferences, party registration, union membership, and the like before getting to the issue at hand (usually national politics although the last was nano-tech–I passed) and closing with demographic questions.
I’m in GA, which is far from being in play.
I realize that Zogby isn’t about to explain the methodolgy but just as with Robo polls the results a can be compared to random sample phone interview polls run contemporaneously.
I receive my email notices during roughly the same period as the Zogby telephone polls
I am in the Zogby internet polling population though
DEFINITELY not in a battleground state (Kerry +15 in CA..Field Poll)..
I have been doing this for 3 years or so but thought that the project was experimental.
Is this not still the case?
AND
What are the methodolgical probems
The methodology page on the “interactive version” says as much:
“Slight weightings were applied to ensure that the selection of participants accurately reflects characteristics of voting population, including region, party, age, race, religion, and gender.”
I imagine that you list your party affiliation and other demographic info, and then John Zogby takes the data, and tweeks the sample based on party affiliation.
For example, say in state A, 75% of the respondats were Dems, 15% were Indys, and 10% were Repubs. However, the actual party registration breakdown in state A is 45% Dem, 40% Repub, and 15% Indy. So, JZ would just do a sample dist of 45% D, 40% R, and 15% I.
Ya, but Republicans tend to stuff the ballots more than Dems đ
My question is, how does responding to an email make the process more accurate? I mean, unless Zogby has some sort of vetting process…
Isn’t it more likely for Dems to have internet?