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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded: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.
Do any of the polling organizations feel embarassed?
Following the critical analysis of Gallup on this site, and elsewhere, I read their “final” numbers today with simple astonishment. Apparently, at the last moment, rather than have the election prove their consistent bias, they have fudged, to give the impression, that their poll is predicting a deadheat!
The Corporate Right-Wing Media should and must be destroyed.
P.S. the 95% confidence interval on those Sunday results is +/- 5%.
Did my comment about the CBS poll implying 42.4 percent support for Bush on Sunday go through? My browser flipped out just as I was posting.
Bush’s LV support on Sunday in the CBS poll was approximately 42.4%. Wow!
This is based on the calculation that about 404 respondents on Thursday through Saturday supported bush (49% of 824 respondents) and 561 respondents did so on Thursday through Sunday (47% of 1194 respondents). The number of respondents on Sunday was 370 (1194-824), so Bush’s support was about (561-404)/370=.424, or 42.4%. The calculation is not exact, since it is based on the likely voter model, and could be biased if there was substantial change in the proportion of likely voters on Sunday. I couldn’t find the RV numbers from the earlier period, so had to do the calculation for LVs.
In any case, the main point is clear: on Sunday, Bush’s support in the CBS poll collapsed.
This and other polls seem to indicate the ‘break’ to Kerry. Is that youe take? Will there be more released tomorrow to calm my nerves?
Very interesting data from Harris Poll about cellphone only voters:
People with cell phones and no landlines
One subject of much discussion in this election is that a growing number
of people have no traditional “landline” phones but have cell phones and
cannot be reached by traditional telephone surveys.
Data from our online survey suggest that six percent (6%) of all likely
voters now fall into this category and that they are voting strongly for John
Kerry by 56 to 38 percent over President Bush.
These results suggest that telephone surveys which miss almost everyone
without landlines will, even if they are accurate, slightly overestimate
President Bush’s vote and slightly underestimate Senator Kerry’s vote. This
also explains a small part of the difference between our online and telephone
surveys.