Did Backlash Actually Kill the Trump Funding Freeze?
Chuck Schumer jumps on the funding freeze with each toes.
Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Photographs
This week the Trump administration set off chaos nationwide when it quickly “paused” all federal grants and loans pending a assessment of which applications adjust to Donald Trump’s coverage edicts. The order got here down in an sudden memo issued by the Workplace of Administration and Finances on Monday.
Now OMB has rescinded the memo with out remark simply as immediately, lower than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal decide. Including to the pervasive confusion, White Home Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt instantly insisted on Wednesday that the funding freeze was nonetheless on as a result of Trump’s government orders on DEI and different prohibited insurance policies remained in place. However there’s no manner this truly will get carried out with out somebody, someplace, figuring out precisely what’s being frozen. So for the second, it’s protected to say the funding freeze is off.
Why did Workforce Trump again off this explicit initiative so shortly? It’s straightforward to say the administration was responding to D.C. district decide Loren AliKhan’s injunction halting the freeze. However then once more, the administration (and notably OMB director nominee Russell Vought) has been spoiling for a court docket struggle over the constitutionality of the Impoundment Management Act that the proposed freeze so clearly violated. Absolutely one thing else was improper with the freeze, apart from the unbelievable diploma of chaos related to its rollout, requiring a number of clarifications of which companies and applications it affected (which can have been a function relatively than a bug to the initiative’s government-hating designers). In keeping with the New York Occasions, the unique OMB memo, regardless of its unprecedented nature and sweeping scope, wasn’t even vetted by senior White Home officers like alleged coverage overlord Stephen Miller.
Democrats have been fast to say that they helped generate a public backlash to the funding freeze that compelled the administration to reverse course, as Punchbowl Information defined even earlier than the OMB memo was rescinded:
A Monday night time memo from the Workplace of Administration and Finances ordering a freeze in federal grant and mortgage applications despatched congressional Republicans scrambling and helped Democrats rally behind a transparent anti-Trump message. Senate Minority Chief Chuck Schumer blasted Trump as “lawless, damaging, merciless.”
D.C. senator Patty Murray, the highest Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, warned that hundreds of federal applications could possibly be impacted, together with veterans, regulation enforcement and firefighters, suicide hotlines, navy assist to international allies, and extra …
Throughout a Senate Democratic Caucus lunch on Tuesday, Schumer urged his colleagues to make the freeze “relatable” to their constituents again house, a transparent play for the messaging higher hand. Schumer additionally plans on doing a number of native TV interviews right this moment.
In different phrases, the funding freeze seems to be like a transparent misstep for an administration and a Republican Occasion that had been strolling very tall after the forty seventh president’s first week in workplace, giving Democrats a uncommon perceived “win.” Extra broadly, it suggests that when the real-life implications of Trump’s agenda (together with his assaults on federal spending and the “deep state”) are understood, his public help goes to drop like Wile E. Coyote with an anvil in his paws. If that doesn’t trouble Trump or his disruptive sidekick, Elon Musk, it may trouble among the GOP members of Congress anticipated to implement the legislative components of the MAGA to-do record for 2025.
It’s far too early, nevertheless, to think about that the chaos machine buzzing alongside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will fall silent even for a second. OMB may very effectively challenge a brand new funding-freeze memo the minute the injunction stopping the unique one expires subsequent week. If that doesn’t occur, there could possibly be new presidential government orders (like those that suspended sure foreign-aid applications and vitality subsidies) and, finally, congressional laws. Democrats and Trump-skeptical Republicans might want to keep on their toes to maintain up with this administration’s schemes and its willingness to shatter norms.
But it surely’s true that the voters that lifted Trump to the White Home for the second time nearly certainly wasn’t voting to sharply reduce, if not terminate, the host of in style federal applications that seemed to be underneath the gun when OMB issued its funding freeze memo. Ultimately the malice and the fiscal math that led to this and different efforts to destroy large areas of home governance will change into arduous to disclaim and not possible to rescind. And at that time there actually could also be political hell to pay.
