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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded: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.
For Democrats there is no path for a Senate victory in 2022 either if things continue as they have.
Biden must go full economic populist from day one:
1. Wages. Bring up a vote on raising the minimum wage, but also establish a new framework for minimum wages in the United States. We need a clear differentiation between regions and inside regions between urban, suburban and rural areas. Bring up the minimum wage for professionals, administrators and executives too.
2. Place based development. Good jobs are concentrating in only a few neighborhoods in a few cities. The federal government must require corporations, starting with federal contractors, to spread jobs so that the working class, both white and non-white, has access to good quality jobs.
3. Follow up on executive action on prescription drugs.
4. Marihuana decriminalization, both legislative and executive-regulatory.
5. Instruct the Department of Justice to continue and expand anti-trust actions in the information technology sector.
6. Instruct the Department of Justice to begin anti-trust actions in the agriculture sector. Expand subsidies to agriculture as a consequence of trade wars, but require more production for domestic consumption.
Biden must also move to the right or center right on several issues:
1. Funding the Police. Get the Party behind a unified legislative and fiscal position that is easy to explain. Make sure this position can be implemented quickly everywhere from the biggest and most diverse cities to the smallest villages that Democrats control. Convince the most radical Democrats that this is the best position to have. Democrats can’t continue with the current messaging cacophony.
2. China. Keep Trump’s framework. Actually, pledge to deepen the decoupling.
3. Support national voter id and other changes to address even the slightest possibility of voter fraud.
4. Authoritarianism in Latin America. As foreign policy is within the President’s primary jurisdiction, develop a policy on how to deal with Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, as well as Brazil, that puts the primary focus on human rights and democracy. Go beyond platitudes and appoint someone with an exclusive focus on this. Reject incrementalism in sanctions (either putting them in place or lifting them) though, it doesn’t work.
5. Immigration. Allow moderate immigrant groups to shape the Party’s position. This will inevitably lead to focus on comprehensive reform and a rejection of open borders. The Party should repudiate the concept of sanctuaries. The Party wouldn’t tolerate sanctuaries for racism, so why support sanctuaries where the law is not applied evenly. Defunding sanctuary cities should be contingent on passing comprehensive reform.
6. Israel, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and the Middle East and East Mediterranean. Keep Trump’s policy objectives. Biden’s original idea of partioning Irak shows he understands that final solutions are important. On Iran the point is basically about making it a better regional actor. No simple return to the previous nuclear framework. On the Middle East Peace Process the pressure needs to be kept up on Palestinians and repudiation of boycott movements against Israel. Palestinians should be both pressured and allowed to hold elections so that they can appoint a legitimate peace negotiator with Israel, which is what has been missing for more than a decade. Lebanon may also be about to flip. Saudi Arabia’s modernization needs to be supported, so no place for sanctions there. The Yemeni peace process is important but secondary to other objectives. The Syrian, Libyan and Iraq stabilization are more important and require real geopolitical vision. The US needs to intervene more on the Cyprus and Greek Aegean conflicts, so that Turkey can be at least partially appeased. The Armenians and Kurds problems need to receive more US attention with the US pressuring both to compromise in relation to their territorial ambitions.
7. Military spending, more and better.
8. Global warming. Push other countries to make more efforts. Continue supporting natural gas at home and its use abroad. Get other countries to stop using coal. Focus at home and abroad on electric cars. Develop a framework for a carbon tax at the border on imported goods just like the European Union is considering.
9. Crack down on higher education cost inflation.
The reason so many Democrats are mad as hell is because not only did the party underperform, but the polls we rely on for deciding things in primaries would also probably be wrong.
Late deciders once again broke for Trump though.
In the most fundamental way this election was an “its the economy, stupid” vote.
Losing with the white moderates in Maine. Losing with the white populists in Montana. Where are the Senate pickups we were promised?
Arizona already went through decades of Trumpism, just like California before it. Doesn’t mean the model is replicable in states with less Hispanic immigration or with immigration from Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, etc.
Trump has done well even with Libertarians running pretty good in many states. Meanwhile the Green vote collapsed.
Democrats ran on covid and demeanor. Republicans ran against political correctness and on the economy.
The people who came out for Trump voted because they liked him.
The Democrats who came out again for Biden (many after not voting in 2016) voted for a diversity of reasons. The few Republicans who voted for Biden did it to stop Trump.
The Republican party is the minority party yet is more structurally strong now than in 2016. They have a clear path forward with America First and opposing all the myriad manifestations of toxic wokeness. Their path is clear as in Europe.
Gays will continue voting for Trump. Trump was bad on transgender rights but neutral on gay rights. Transgender rights are stuck because they are choosing the wrong framework to push for an incoherent agenda. More equal protection under the law and less culture wars on pronouns. The bathroom thing is unenforceable and easy to mock but transgender leadership is choosing moralizing.
The left is not anywhere near ascendant in the US.
30% of Puerto Rican in Florida voted for Trump, for example.
Florida voted to raise the minimum wage and to enfranchise ex convicts. It also reelected its Republican Governor, elected a Republican Senator and twice voted for Trump. Floridians who are moderate must have buyers’ remorse with their experience with Gillum. But the state is not reactionary or conservative.
If I was in Florida looking at how California closed Disneyland and Universal Studios taking away the livelihoods of all those Hispanic service workers and still having an epidemic and then considered that Democrats would also close Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando if voters let them I would have to balance competing ethical interests. When it comes to covid old people are voting out of self interest. It doesn’t mean their ethics are superior, as we see in all the other ways they vote.
2018 was overshadowed in 2020 by moralizing about masks and ambiguity over cultural issues.
Is it progress that in order to have the Squad speaking about things that will never become legislation we have to lose seats that are key to getting anything at all done? Loses in congressional and state legislative seats, including in New York, will soon tell us.
If Biden wins and loses the Senate it will be a good reminder that the Electoral College is not the only constitutional problem. Democrats had no ideas beyond filibuster reform (which would be moot) and ludicrous ideas about DC and PR as states.
Encouraging mail vote turned out to be an incredibly flawed strategy when it comes to perception. Even early voting in places like New York that don’t do an early count was a bit stupid.
Neither the Democratic party nor the left have paths forward.
1. The white suburban route requires moving a lot more to the cultural center and that wouldn’t pay dividends for a while.
2. A white working class route would be even more uphill as it would pit the suburban fiscal moderates against the working class populists.
3. The Bernie strategy of turning out disenchanted progressives has been twice disproven.
4. The identity politics BLM agenda doesn’t even have the support of many Black elected officials and is stuck even in the Bluest of cities, yet is incredibly divisive at the national level and in most key battlegrounds.
Black Democratic partisans made Biden the nominee. Dettached Black voters are another thing.
I suspect that the strategies of neither Biden nor Bernie would have worked.
The presumption that covid would only work against Trump I think was misguided. Covid also worked in his favor as people want to get back to work. The media fear mongering over covid may have backfired.
The Black, Hispanic and White working class male vote (including the gay vote) may have tipped further enough towards Trump to make the Republican party even more hegemonic in most of the states of USA.
Democrats’ historic mishandling of deindustrialization and China, silence over authoritarianism in Latin America and the ambiguity over defunding police all contribute to pushing at the margins just enough against Democrats.