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Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge.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freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded: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.
Color me unsurprised by the midterm results, given the extensive and treacherous crosscurrents in politics today.
Without a doubt, the unaddressed gerrymandering in North Carolina and Wisconsin not only affected the outrageous partisan skew in their state legislatures but it also suppressed turnout, contributing to the narrow Republican Senate victories. Gerrymandering has a little appreciated suppressive effect on statewide races. When your vote has no chance of affecting the outcome in a congressional district or local judicial and legislative races, you’re less likely to think voting is worth the bother and this drags on statewide contests where there is less truth to that despair. That’s gotta be worth at least the 1.5% margins in these two Senate races. Wherever this gerrymandering ended in 2022, like Michigan, Democrats had clear breakthroughs. I suspect if Texas weren’t so badly gerrymandered, it would already be quite clearly competitive. The gross gerrymander in Florida also exaggerated the Republican sweep there.
Even more important factors in the 2022 results, however, have been overlooked. A week later and the talking heads still miss the most important demographic stories of the pandemic crisis: 1) Covid mortality and 2) the great pandemic migration. A year ago, I realized that the survival rates of the vaccinated combined with the partisan differences in vaccination rates would lead to approximately a net loss of fifty thousand Republican voters for every one hundred thousand Covid deaths. Since the vaccines appeared, at least a million people have died from Covid – and that skew in partisan death rates preceded the vaccines when red counties started prematurely lifting mask mandates and closures.
Frankly, 1.5 million dead is just the death rate measured in patients one month after contracting Covid. The earlier Covid variants killed up to 20% more between month two and six but these are often passed off as heart failure, diabetes and stroke – despite the known fact Covid causes and aggravates all of these conditions, which you can see in the spiking “excess death” rates, the vast bulk of which constitute cardiovascular and cancer deaths. These aren’t due to putting off checkups. The evidence suggests that the supposedly “non-Covid” excess death rates are in fact caused directly by Covid because A) Covid drives these types of problems (through TLR4 signaling, if you must know) and B) the excess deaths perfectly track Covid case counts, rising and falling with them.
Most of these short Covid deaths would be older men who tend to vote Republican anyway, even if vaccination rates weren’t skewed by partisanship. (I’ll leave off a psychological explanation as to why crypto-segregationists would flip out so self-destructively at the thought of being caught on the wrong side of cordons and quarantines they had built up for social “undesirables” over the centuries. “We’re not like *those* people,” seems to be the underlying excuse for dismissing Covid’s seriousness, as if wearing a mask was a confession to the world that they doubted the state of their own grace.)
Though devastating, this analysis doesn’t even take into account how long Covid affected the electorate. Though vaccines are less protective against long Covid than short Covid death, there are still ten to thirty million long Covid cases now – some quite serious and involving dementia, stroke and organ failure, none of which is conducive to enthusiasm in life, for voting or anything else. Though long Covid falls more on women, that partisan skew in vaccination still creates a heavy social burden that the corporate press refuses to acknowledge.
Neither the pandemic movements or the deaths and disability have been caught in the census statistics and therefore none of this data is in any polling or likely voter models. Inflationary currents may have shifted some wavering souls against the Democrats, but the lack of red county investments in education and health care took their toll. The 2022 results weren’t due just to young voters turning out who couldn’t be easily polled, but it was also older voters failing to show up because after they rejected reality, reality rejected them.
That problem won’t go away with Trump. Donald Trump isn’t the fever; he’s the thermometer. Segregationists need an ice bath before their brain (Fox News?) explodes from the self-mutilating cognitive dissonance.
In addition to Covid rejecting its deniers, American civilization is also about to get rejected by global warming, financial looting, rent-seeking, uncompetitive cartel control of markets, sickcare and an ever-giving cornucopia of other delusions flowing out of our “big lies.” We’ll need more than grievance conspiracy theories to rescue us from the very real damage.
But if grievance is all you care about, Donald Trump will make a perfect House Speaker. All the incoming “Freedom” caucus wants to do is sabotage Biden and Trump is the best qualified for the job – attacking, offending, making noise and accomplishing nothing. Plus, the job will be a poisoned chalice, suiting most Republicans behind the scenes just fine.