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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded: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 voted for her, but I think Martha Coakley was a terrible choice and a terrible candidate. She was smug, puffed up with a sense of entitlement, unable to articulate her positions clearly or defend them credibly. If she’s the best candidate we can field for a critical seat at a critical time, we should prepare ourselves for another generation or two of kleptocratic crony capitalism under a Republican administration.
Question for Imn2Paine: why is forking over to rich freeloaders OK while taking care of the poor and supporting the middle class is not?
Imn2Paine,
As you stand against our paying to provide for the poor, you might consider that no one chooses to be poor. Contrary to popular opinion, we human beings do not have a free will to be and do as we would like. Our genes (nature) and our past experiences (nurture) completely determine who we are, and what we will or will not do.
If the Mass. race is not about Coakley, it’s also not about health care. It’s more fundamentally about the basic premises upon which we have created our society. One of them, the belief that we humans have the power to freely choose who we will become and what we will thereafter do, is as false as the literal belief in an Adam and Eve, and a Garden of Eden, or the belief in a flat Earth.
It’s unfortunate that so much of politics is predicated upon an aspect of our world that science fully understands (except, of course, those scientists whose religious or philosophical beliefs over-ride their scientific background and reasoning), and the rest of us are almost completely ignorant of.
This is, or course, not the Democrats, or the Republicans, or anyone else’s fault. I’m not sure we can even rightly say its God’s or the universe’s fault. It is just the way our world has come to be at this point in time.
If and when humanity finally overcomes this insidiously harmful notion of free will, you might better understand the logic behind our tending to those least fortunate among us.
By the way, if you’d like to read a good book that explains in clear scientific terms how it is actually unconscious processes that are responsible for EVERY choice we make, you might consider Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner’s 2002, The Illusion of Conscious Will.
BTW
I am a Coakley supporter.
My comment above was relative to the voice of my moderate and conservative (Reagan Democrats) brothers.
I dislike the notion of a Brown victory.
The race is not about Martha Coakley! She may be what the Republican dominated/produced media/frame portrays her to be (common/not dynamic/victory expected), but the voters here are tired of forking out to the less advantaged.
Section 8 is a better deal than working for a living! Illegals do better than or equal to middle income citizens! You want health coverage? …FOR FREE [working folks and income (the “ownership society”) folks alike pay for it]!!!
A better gig for who?
Democrats in Mass. are moderate and don’t want to fork over for freeloaders, which is what may yield.
God help the Democrats!
If Brown wins, Obama and our Democratic Leaders deserve the blame, not Coakley. They should have been much more invested in her campaign from the very beginning. That’s their job.
If Brown wins, Obama and Reid have a simple choice before them; They can allow Republican Senators to filibuster all major legislation during 2010, which is not a choice at all since it would spell disaster for Democratic candidates in both the Senate and the House in November, or they can change the senate rules on filibusters through means as simple as one recently advanced in a New York Times Op-Ed by Tom Geoghegan;
“The president of the Senate, the vice president himself, could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Our first vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, felt a serious obligation to resolve the ties and tangles of an evenly divided Senate, and they would not have shrunk from such a challenge.”
Or through the strategy Jamie Court described in The Huffington Post;
“Rule 22 of the Senate, governing filibusters, can be changed or eliminated by a simple majority according to the US Supreme Court in U.S. v. Ballin (1892). Senate rules call for 67 to change the cloture rule, but Democrats should be able to rewrite the rules since they control the Rules Committee. Rule 22 can go out the door all together or be modified. Republicans under Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to blow up the filibuster in 2005 with far fewer numbers.”
Or they could rely on the “Nuclear,” or “Constitutional” option. A 2005 report by Betsy Palmer highlights how this would be done. This strategy would have to wait until the new Congress convenes in 2011, and would therefore represent a retributive rather than a pre-emptive response to Republican obstructionism. Palmer describes it;
“One example of the “constitutional” or “nuclear” option revolves on the argument that, on the first day of a new Congress, Senate rules, including Rule XXII, the cloture rule, do not yet apply, and thus can be changed by majority vote.”
If Coakley wins, Democrats can pass major legislation in 2010. If Brown wins, Republicans have the choice in 2010 of allowing Obama to address our pressing concerns like jobs, education and climate change, or block these efforts and thereby force his and Reid’s hand. If Brown wins and Republicans continue to obstruct the Democratic agenda, Obama and Reid will have every good reason, and no reasonable choice but, to change the filibuster rule.
In fact, it might actually work out better in the long run if Brown wins and the Democrats are then forced to change the filibuster rule.
If Massachusetts voters, having passed health insurance reform for themselves, vote to deny it to the rest of Americans, I won’t be able to think of words bad enough for them.