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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded: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.
Don’t expect the polls to carry the day.
Bush is a lot smarter than most Democrats, and realizes that polls mean only present support. Once he’s gotten out there and beat the drum for a while, the polls will change.
Unless Democrats respond in kind, with Kristoff’s advice… reject it sight unseen and declare there is no Crisis.
Cranky, Allen and others.
There are big political and mechanical differences between Iraq and pushing Social Security Privatization through. Once the decision is made to go to war the nation is on a speeding train with no way to control the engineer. And all kinds of wells are tapped: general patriotism “we are at war”, “support the troops”. And once you are engaged in combat it is in many ways too late, there is no easy way to extract yourself.
Social Security is different. No one enlisted in the War on Social Security. It may be true that this president has the iron grip over his party and the media that you suggest, and that he will be able to ram some plan through even in the face of productivity numbers that suggest no crisis at all. I don’t agree with the premises, but those are issues for another time.
The problem Bush and the Republicans face is time. Whatever plan is adopted, it will require months to actually put individual accounts into place and then to allow individuals to exercise whatever limited choices in investment vehicles they have. As the actual details of the plan start coming out, mainly the fact that future benefits even with returns on the private accounts will be much less than promised under the current plan, people will begin to murmer.
Now if they were able to maintain the sense of “crisis” they might sell this as being “better than nothing”. But the only way to do this is to stop reporting economic productivity numbers altogether. 4.0% economic growth for 2004, already in the bag, simply blows the doors off the productivity models of the Social Security Trustees, not just the Intermediate Cost (which called for 2.7% in 2004 and 1.8% in 2005) that produces the 2018 and 2042 dates used by all, but all the Low Cost one that shows no long term shortfall at all (2.8% and 2.1%).
By June it will be clear that doing nothing would have been a better deal than doing something, particularly this something. And Republicans will be staring up a hill at 2006. They will be faced with having broken something that never needed a fix, lurching ever closer to that Third Rail of American politics.
The beauty is that there is no downside to cut and run here. There is no way that accounts will be set up by June and the US will have invested probably a few million dollars in staff time. The Republican Congress will have two choices: repeal it, or ride it into the Valley of Death that will be the 2006 midterms.
Bush may not care, he is not running for reelection, but the firmer he grasps that veto plan, the better for Dems in 2006.
And? Not to be rude, but it appears to me that the general public is not going to be given a chance to express its opinion. Transfer of Social Security wealth to Wall Street is already scheduled to happen, and there will be a big “burst” of support at just the right minute to satisfy the media.
Cranky
OK, but since when does this administration need informed public support to achieve its goals? And the goal here of course is not to improve investment opportunities or retirement benefits for retired Americans – it is to destroy a successful and essential government program as part of an ideological crusade to deligitimize all government programs that do not redstribute wealth upwards. They will lie and distort and dissemble to whatever degree necessary unless Democrats stand up and call this for what it is, and contesting the issue on this terrain – what the American people really want – is not what the fight is about.
That is, of course, until they start the lying.
Actually, check out Talking Points Memo – Josh points out that the Post wrote up the poll quite badly and that the numbers look better for the Democrats.
LATEST NEWS IN THE WASHINGTON STATE GUBERNATORIAL RACE
Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire put together a string of victories Wednesday against Republican Dino Rossi. The race, which still isn’t over, has been extremely close.
Permanent Defense: King County reported +59 votes for Gregoire, giving Gregoire the overall lead in the statewide manual recount by 10 votes. This does not count the 725 ballots the Supreme Court said can be counted.
The especially good news about all of this is it shows Democrats are willing to stand and fight. We won’t be intimidated by the GOP….No more stolen elections! Christine Gregoire has held on for almost two months now – and we believe she will emerge from this as our state’s Governor.
He’s hoping to scare the public into supporting his plans, a la Iraq. The advantage he had that time was that a lot of Americans wanted to lash out at Arabs–any Arabs–in the wake of 911, so they were open to persuasion. The advantage he has this time is that the relentless talk of “Social Security crisis” has eroded the public’s support to some extent, since many are skeptical that they’ll ever get benefits. It’s not as strong a card to play as the post-911 anger was, so there’s hope. Given the Democrats’ disarray, however, I’d say he has a decent chance of prevailing. The real test is whether the Dems can wake up and finally start acting like an opposition party, and not get caught up in giving the Republicans fig leafs.