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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded: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.
I’ll be so sad if Obama wins the nomination this year, because of the way he’s run. Clinton has criticized him, but never his supporters. He basically denounces anybody who supports anyone else.
We’re either corrupt (that’s for bigwigs, and his code for it is that they’re part of “business as usual”) or we’re relics, pessimists, fuddy duddies who want to live in the past (a place where apparently there were a lot of female Presidents I don’t know about), opponents of change, unworthy of his Brave New World.
All it takes to turn a bad person into a good person in Obama’s book is transferring allegiance from Hillary to himself, sufficiently early. After the convention — morally, not practically, speaking — is too late. Ted Kennedy, who has been a Senator for 46 years, and even collaborated with George Bush, isn’t part of “business as usual.” Why? He supports Obama now. And that is the only reason.
Having to support a nominee who has done nothing but diss me all these months will be painful. I’ll do it, if I have to, but I still hope I won’t have to. I have hoped so hard to feel a part of the next Democratic administration, but it seems to me that the “uniter” Obama has told me pretty clearly I’m not the stuff he wants his new America to be made of.
He’ll take my vote, of course, and let me try and make it up to him that I ever supported Hillary Clinton. But basically I’ve marked myself with him as not quite up to snuff, and even if he might have some use for me, his respect I’ll never ever have.
Nor will I have the respect of Obama’s most earnest supporters on the Net, that is abundantly plain. I, who would support any Democratic nominee over any Republican this year, am as bad as any Republican to people who declare they’ll sit the election out or vote for John McCain if Democratic voters have the temerity to deny the nomination to Obama. I’ve failed to recognize his Destiny, and woe to any of us who do not acknowledge our newborn king.
Hillary was supposed to be the divisive one, but she’ll be lovely to former Obama supporters if she gets the nomination. Obama has divided the party into good and bad Democrats. Paul Krugman and Charlie Rangel and I belong to the latter category.
The oh-so-junior Senator from Illinois hates us even worse than he hates Dick Cheney. A Republican for Obama, no matter what eles he believes, is cherished proof of the candidate’s charisma. A Democrat for anybody else, even if he takes the same position on every issue as Barack, proves only his own perfidy.