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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded: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.
Dean’s approach is similar to the one he employed when running for the Democratic presidential nomination. I closely followed his campaign and it certainly appeared that he had a network of supporters throughout the country. Many see the current progressive blogosphere as an extension of Dean’s efforts. Regardless, the 2004 Iowa caucus results, which most political observers believe is all about having people on the ground within the state, seemed to indicate that the Dean model had failed. As I’ve attempted to understand the particulars, my suspicion is that the structure in Iowa, and possibly the fifty state structure, simply doesn’t have the depth that is needed to win voters.
The fact that Dean was a leader in the use of the internet in the 2004 presidential campaign allowed him to amass like minded individuals and gain a significant funding advantage…but it never translated into a groundswell of voters needed to carry state primaries. Dean frequently cites his fundraising efforts, and while they have been successful, many are concerned that his use of the funds may be questionable.
I’ve previously written that Karl Rove understands the American voter and in so doing realizes that voters are busy and that they ultimately devote minimal time to elections. The notion that Howard Dean’s efforts are an attempt to emulate the Republican strategy may be a misnomer. To assume that Rove believes in a grassroots strategy is naive and speaks to a superficial analysis. While it often appears that the Republicans have grassroots constituencies, I would argue that they actually have “issue” constituencies that Rove has been able to manipulate. By identifying specific issues, he is quickly able to determine the numbers needed to win an election.
Once the groups are identified, the strategy is to target messages to those groups in order to win their support. The coalition isn’t the result of a groundswell of voters who guide the Party; rather the coalition is the result of shepherding large voting blocks into the Party with narrow messages delivered by co-opted leaders within those specific groups who receive access to power and influence in exchange for delivering the voters. The distinction is subtle but significant.
read the full article here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com