The Bucks Stop Here
Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a guy famous for not paying his bills is now leading an administration that just stopped paying theirs. Project 2025 is not only here, the pace of the deployment is more like Projectile 2025. “President Donald Trump’s White House ordered a pause in all federal grants and loans starting on Tuesday, a sweeping decision that could disrupt education, health care and poverty programs, housing assistance, disaster relief and a host of other initiatives that depend on trillions of federal dollars. The freeze followed Trump’s suspension of foreign aid last week, a move that began cutting off the supply of lifesaving medicines on Tuesday to countries around the world that depend on U.S. development assistance.” Trump funding freeze could disrupt education, housing, disaster aid. It basically disrupts everything, and it wrests control over spending matters from Congress. “The U.S. Constitution gives Congress control over spending matters, but Trump said during his campaign that he believes the president has the power to withhold money for programs he dislikes. His nominee for White House budget director, Russell Vought, who has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, headed a think tank that has argued Congress cannot require a president to spend money.”
+ “Democratic attorneys general from states including New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are moving to keep funds flowing to state governments and cities.” NYT (Gift Article): States Will Sue Trump to Stop Federal Grant Freeze. Unpaid bills. Endless lawsuits. A deluge of norm busting news. Eight days in and we’re fully living in Trump’s America.
+ The domestic freeze follows the international aid freeze. A US shutdown on foreign aid is hitting from Africa to Asia to Ukraine. Here’s how. “U.S-funded aid programs around the world have begun firing staff and shutting down or preparing to stop their operations.”
+ “Appointments are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics, according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Administration Halts H.I.V. Drug Distribution in Poor Countries.
+ “It’s hard to think through everything affected. Already the halt to USAID budgets has cut off funding for the prison guards holding 9,500 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria, according to Syria expert Charles Lister. Cancer research, major parts of every state’s budget, the grants that keep the local daycare center running. This hits basically everything. The best way to understand this is that it is essentially a unilateral government shutdown on steroids. Even government shutdowns distinguish between essential and inessential government activities. This doesn’t.” Some good analysis from Josh Marshall: Trump Sparks Constitutional Crisis, Seizing Budget Authority from Congress.
+ The architect of Project 2025, Russell Vought, has been projecting this stuff for years, along with the ways the government should respond when folks don’t fall in line. ProPublica: ‘Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda. (All of this may not be what the average voter was thinking about at the polls in November. But this is how America voted and now we’re paying the piper. Even if, as of today, he’s not paying us.)
