On Wednesday, the Trump administration rescinded its controversial and illegal directive from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to freeze federal funding. On Tuesday, states struggled to access Medicaid and Head Start portals, although the administration stated that programs that provided direct payments to individuals were supposedly exempt. The memo, some experts said, amounted to a partial government shutdown by decree. The fallout, even after the memo itself was rescinded, created chaos.
According to Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, although the OMB memo has been rescinded, previous executive orders on the freezing of federal funds still stand––i.e., funding ostensibly related to the Trump administration’s definitions of “Marxist equity, transgenderism, anti-abortion, anti-DEI.”
KAREN DOLAN; @karendolan, karen@ips-dc.org
Dolan is the project director of the Criminalization of Race and Poverty program at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Dolan told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “This is a firestorm intended to keep the public off-balance, afraid, and in a panic. I would be surprised if the average family had been able to keep up with all that’s happened in the last week, never mind the last day.
“The memo from OMB on Monday night was a poorly written, clumsy, vague memo that sweepingly declared that all federal funding would be frozen––with a footnote that said Social Security, Medicare, and programs providing ‘direct assistance’ wouldn’t be affected, but with no clarification on what ‘direct assistance’ meant. This conceivably could have caught up every program. The majority of American families rely on one or more of these programs: Medicare, rental assistance, food assistance, disaster aid, mental health help, air traffic. Suddenly they were all put at risk.
“This memo was either incompetent or designed to cause confusion and panic. Either way, it’s destructive to the American people. There is no legal authority for the Trump administration to do this. It was an illegal, unconstitutional power grab to steal hard-earned taxpayer money from American families. We’ve paid for these programs. The funds have been appropriated by the legislative branch, and only the legislative branch has the power of the purse. In the separation of powers in our Constitution, the president of the United States cannot make law. If this memo had been allowed to go through as written, it would have been a government shutdown by decree: blatantly illegal.
“The pushback was swift and fierce; lawsuits were immediately launched. Republican members of Congress even pushed back. Even Republicans don’t want their constituents to lose healthcare, childcare, access to essential services and infrastructure and disaster aid. However, the Trump administration needs trillions of dollars in order to enact their massive tax cut package to the billionaires who back and support Donald Trump. The only way they can get those dollars is out of the pockets of the rest of us. Trump doesn’t have the constitutional right to ‘impound’ those funds. They’re trying every tactic, legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional, in order to achieve that goal. The best way to do that is to cause confusion and panic so no one knows what is going on.
“Even though this memo was rescinded, it doesn’t mean danger is gone. The stealing is still happening, even if the chaotic, massive overreach has been rescinded. When you have uncertainty in programs that provide vital assistance to families, you see increased illness, death, lifelong poor outcomes for children, roads that aren’t fixed, bridges that break, disaster aid unaddressed, transportation needs that go unaddressed. It’s a dangerous, volatile environment. This is a deliberate strategy to get illegal things done––and to distract from what they’re able to legally get done through a Republican Congress that is still highly unpopular, including cuts to programs that Americans overwhelmingly support, like Medicaid, SNAP, and Head Start.
“Other freezes are still planned. The instruction to government programs to prove they comply with Trump’s pronouncements about Marxism, transgenderism, and the Green New Deal is still in place. They said Medicaid and Head Start wouldn’t be affected, but the programs that states had trouble accessing were on the list of programs that were supposedly exempt. There’s nothing that anyone can point to that is reliably exempting any of these programs. Everything is on the table, one way or another.”