#impoundment

(Source)

Barbara Rogan

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 1, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 02, 2025

Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”

Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”

That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.

You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.

It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”

The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”

Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.

Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.

Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.

The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.

But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.

According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

There’s a common reaction to the headlines these days. Over the past 100 days, those of us who spent any time in law school (or paid attention in civics class) find ourselves recoiling, blinking, or shaking our heads in disbelief, thinking to ourselves, “He can’t do that.” “He” being Trump, and “that” being whatever latest affront to our Constitution and laws he has announced or his administration has done. Because these attacks are so rapid-fire in nature, it’s easy to get lost in the fog of his war on our founding principles. When this happens, it’s helpful to climb to a higher vantage point, reassert how things are supposed to be, and then understand more precisely how Trump has come for the constitutional, foundational values of our nation. These are not always so easy to parse or understand at first glance. Trump isn’t acting with pinpoint precision but rather with a heavy hammer. Moreover, he acts primarily in his own self-interest to accumulate power and money, while our Constitution suffers collateral damage. To complicate things further, some of his declarations and actions violate multiple parts of our Constitution, while others leverage one violation to create or amplify others. Today, I want to focus on five basic principles and rights contained within our founding documents, as envisioned by the founders:

The establishment of co-equal, separate branches of government

The prohibition on corruption within the Emoluments Clause

The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and a free press

The Fourth Amendment’s right to due process under law

The Fourteenth Amendment’s right to equal protection

For each of the above, I’ll lay out relevant language and principles before discussing a few key ways Trump has shredded them through his executive orders and actions. Note that this is not meant to be exhaustive; that would no doubt fill whole history books and legal treatises. Rather, through some better-known examples, I hope to provide a way to think rigorously and with discipline about how Trump threatens our constitutional foundations. Through a clearer understanding of the precise nature of his attacks and the core values he threatens, we can all feel less overwhelmed and helpless in the face of the flood while steeling and grounding ourselves more firmly in the defense of our constitutional Republic.

Stay in your lane, Donald: Disrespecting the separation of powers

Our Constitution begins with three distinct articles that establish a tripartite government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches. We understand these to be both independent and co-equal, and that they are intended to place checks upon the power of the others. But where does that notion of separate, co-equal branches that check each other come from? It derives partly from the fact that we have three separate branches in the first place, each charged with different roles. The legislature makes laws and controls the public purse. The executive faithfully executes those laws. And the judiciary, at least since Marbury v. Madison, acts as the arbiter and interpreter of our laws and the Constitution. We often take this set-up for granted, but at one point in our history, before we became a sovereign nation, all these powers lay in one party’s hands. It was a major reason we rebelled against the British crown. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47,

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One of the first things his administration did was freeze billions in funds that Congress had already appropriated. This is called “impoundment” and the Supreme Court ruled 50 years ago, when Nixon tried it, that it’s unconstitutional because it usurps the power of Congress over public funds. If our democracy were functioning in a healthy way, Congress would have impeached Trump over this power grab the moment it happened. We face a crisis today precisely because our GOP-controlled Congress is unwilling to stand up to him and reclaim its authority. That means we must fight in the courts until we have a chance to change the balance of power in the 2026 midterm elections. Beyond seizing critical control of the flow of funds, Trump has also unilaterally imposed the most massive tax hike in generations. He’s done this by raising import taxes, also known as tariffs. It’s important to understand that the President doesn’t actually have the power to impose tariffs on his own. Trump is arguing that Congress gave him that power, however, by allowing him to declare “national emergencies” and impose tariffs in response. But these “emergencies” are pretextual and non-existent, and rule by emergency decree is how authoritarians seize power within a democracy, whether it’s Germany in the 1930s or the U.S. today. Once again, it’s largely up to Congress to stop him, but even just yesterday Republicans in the Senate narrowly voted down an effort to repeal Trump’s tariff authority. The most critical test of our system of governance is now well underway. The judiciary is empowered with interpreting our Constitution, and in a 9-0 opinion has ordered the government to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego García, a migrant wrongfully sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador at the request of and with payment from the United States. To date, the White House has not done so, though there are reports that half-hearted efforts to request Abrego García’s return have finally begun. In an interview with ABC News, Trump startlingly admitted that he has the power to obey the Supreme Court but is declining to do so because “the lawyers” said the ruling said otherwise. (It did not.) If the White House can seize the power of the purse from Congress and can thumb its nose at judiciary orders, then it has seized for itself “all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands” as Madison warned. And that is in fact “the very definition of tyranny."

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That pesky First Amendment: Trump tramples upon free speech and a free press

Of all of the amendments to our Constitution, we are likely most familiar with the First. On the subject of freedom of speech, it says this:

[Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble….]

Courts have interpreted this to include any state official action, including by the White House, that impinges on free speech. These protections importantly include not permitting government officials to favor one type of speech over another. Thus, content-based laws or restrictions are disfavored and presumptively unconstitutional, while content-neutral laws or regulations (which affect the time, place or manner of speech, without regard to content) can more readily pass muster. For example, in 1972 the Supreme Court held in Police Dept. of City of Chicago v. Mosley that the “government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial rules.” Further, it held in 1992 in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul that the “government may not regulate speech based on hostility—or favoritism—toward the underlying message expressed.” And in 1995, it held in Rosenberger v. University of Virginia that a public university couldn’t deny funding to a student publication because its statements were religiously themed, provided it was supplying funding to other groups. This was a form of “viewpoint” discrimination—a disallowed form of content-based regulation. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over the past 100 days, the Trump White House has regularly engaged in content-based bias and viewpoint discrimination, particularly against the press and other institutions such as big law firms and universities. Take its actions toward the Associated Press. When that organization refused to start calling the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s new name for it (the “Gulf of America”), Trump tried to ban it from the White House. A federal judge quickly ruled that this was improper viewpoint discrimination. “Under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” wrote federal district court Judge Trevor McFadden. “The Constitution requires no less.” Trump has also come after major law firms and elite universities for their liberal politics and advocacy for his opponents. One executive order targeted the firm of Perkins Coie, which had done legal work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as defended against election-related lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, by stripping its lawyers of security clearances necessary to do a great deal of high-level government work.

Places You Can’t Go in Summer

The Shutdown as Strategy: Authoritarianism by Other Means

How Trump has transformed government shutdowns from rare breakdowns into deliberate weapons to punish opponents, reallocate resources, and remake the state.

James B. Greenberg

Oct 06, 2025

We all watched the stalemate drag on, the clock ticking toward shutdown. Yet there is no doubt that Trump engineered it. Negotiations were perfunctory, Republican leaders were instructed not to move beyond a clean bill, and the president himself showed no interest in compromise. His aim was rupture, not resolution. A shutdown halts ordinary government, opens space to push the Project 2025 blueprint under the cover of a fiscal dispute, and pins the blame on Democrats.

The results speak for themselves. Federal agencies are now branded “Democrat Agencies.” Programs in Democratic states have been frozen. Projects from Chicago’s transit lines to California’s clean-energy initiatives are stalled. Trump’s language frames Democrats not as rivals but as “radical leftists,” an “enemy from within.” Each crisis becomes an opening to strip away the institutions that sustain civic life.

Shutdowns were once unthinkable. The first came in 1976 and, for decades, they were brief and awkward—accidents of budgeting. By the 1990s they had become bargaining chips. Under Trump they are something else: instruments of rule. Fiscal chaos has been turned from breakdown into method.

The pattern is not unique to the United States. We have seen it in Hungary, India, and Israel, where budgets and bureaucracies are turned into weapons. Opponents are cast as existential threats. Repetition makes the language ordinary, until cuts, impoundments, and purges appear natural, even necessary. What once looked like sabotage is recast as the routine work of government.

This strategy does not rely on budgets alone. It begins with language, which reshapes how institutions are seen before they are dismantled. Words carry power. Calling an agency a “Democrat Agency” is not a casual jab but an act of reclassification. Institutions that once served the public are redefined as partisan outposts, primed for dismantling. Once renamed, eliminating them looks less like sabotage and more like patriotic duty. The symbolic act matters as much as the budget cut. It blurs the line between citizen and enemy, between service and subversion.

Language and performance set the stage, but they mean little without machinery to carry them out. Style becomes strategy. What some critics call instability—his erratic posts, grandiose claims, and volatile speeches—often serves a purpose. Unpredictability keeps adversaries off balance and enforces discipline within his own ranks. In authoritarian politics, disorder is not failure but method, a way to keep others on the defensive.

That’s where Russell Vought, who Trump has dubbed the Grim Reaper, steps in. Vought, a principal author of Project 2025, now heads the Office of Budget Management, Under his direction, OMB has begun withholding funds already appropriated by Congress, often targeting Democratic states. These impoundments track closely with Project 2025’s goals: shrinking the workforce, dismantling regulatory agencies, and concentrating power in the executive. The shutdown functions less as a pause than as a rehearsal.

And the effects do not remain in Washington. Each impoundment and furlough ripples outward into daily life. Medicaid faces new work requirements and cuts. Nutrition programs are pared back. FEMA is hollowed out at the start of a season of climate-driven disasters. Grants for domestic violence programs have stalled with DOJ staff furloughed. Behind every “cut” is a life: a mother unable to find shelter, a diabetic rationing insulin, a town waiting for help after a flood. These are not side effects but deliberate pressure points, chosen for their impact on constituencies already marked as expendable.

The shutdown also redraws the economy of power. It is not austerity but redistribution. Resources are withheld from communities judged disloyal and redirected to those deemed loyal. Subsidies, contracts, and tax breaks flow to fossil-fuel firms, defense industries, and wealthy donors. The state shifts from guarantor of public welfare to enforcer of partisan reward and punishment.

Trump’s erratic behavior may itself be strategic. Instability is less an explanation than an instrument. It keeps adversaries guessing, unsettles allies, and creates space for unilateral moves. The outcome is unmistakable: Democrats treated as enemies, agencies dismissed as scams, and the president posing as sole defender. The shutdown is not a fiscal accident but governance through disruption.

This is no ordinary budget fight. It is a political intervention designed to reshape the state. To dismiss it as gridlock is to miss its purpose. To recognize it as strategy is to confront the danger directly. The question is not Trump’s state of mind, but whether the republic can withstand being remade in his image.

Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020.

Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 981–1002.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby at Judd Legum at Popular Information:

On Monday, the Trump administration issued an extraordinary memo ordering federal agencies to indefinitely freeze the "disbursement of all Federal financial assistance." The freeze was scheduled to take effect at 5 PM on Tuesday, according to the memo, authored by the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, Matthew J. Vaeth. Each agency has until February 10 to provide detailed information about every grant, loan, or financial assistance program covered by the memo. Even after submitting this information, the freeze continues "until OMB has reviewed and provided guidance to your agency with respect to the information submitted." Essentially, agencies are prohibited from spending money on Congressionally authorized financial assistance programs until the Trump administration reviews and approves each program. (Financial assistance provided directly to individuals, such as Social Security and Medicare, are excluded from the new directive.)

The stated purpose of the freeze is to prevent the "use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies," which the memo describes as "a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve." The memo suggests that federal agencies are prohibited from spending money for these purposes because of a series of executive orders, such as Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, issued by President Donald Trump in the first days of his presidency. The first issue with the memo is that the articulated policy is hopelessly vague. The Green New Deal is a set of policies that were proposed but never enacted into law. Marxism is a political philosophy, not a category of financial assistance programs administered by the federal government. There is no explanation of how an agency could determine which programs include these supposedly prohibited concepts.

The second issue is the process described by the memo is illegal. Once Congress passes a law that includes a financial assistance program and the president signs the law, the executive branch must execute the law. There is no exception to this rule for programs that allegedly support Marxism, transgenderism, or the Green New Deal. If Trump opposes any financial assistance program that Congress has previously funded, the legal course of action is to convince Congress to rescind the funding. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 provides the only legal mechanism for an administration to temporarily withhold funding for a program. Under the law, Trump could delay funding a program for up to 45 days if he first sends a message to Congress explaining why he believes funding should be rescinded. But if Congress does not pass legislation rescinding the funds within 45 days, the administration must disperse the funds. Trump has not sent any such message to Congress. As a result, the freeze of funds is illegal.

[...]

Even a temporary freeze will have major consequences

The memo did not specify precisely what programs will be affected, but it could impact billions of dollars in federal spending. Programs that could be affected by the freeze include the National School Lunch Program, which “feeds about 28 million American schoolchildren each month” and Meals on Wheels, which “delivers about 250 million meals each year to more than 2 million seniors.” Other programs that could lose funding include disaster relief aid, assistance for homeless shelters, housing assistance, and education programs. Diane Yentel, the chief executive of The National Council of Nonprofits, released a statement expressing concern about programs researching “cures for childhood cancer,” offering “safety from domestic violence,” and running “suicide hotlines” losing funding. “The impact of even a short pause in funding could be devastating and cost lives,” Yentel said. According to a White House fact sheet posted to X by Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein, programs that provide “direct benefits to Americans [are] explicitly excluded from the pause and exempted from this review process.” The fact sheet claims that Medicaid, SNAP, funds for small businesses, Pell Grants, Head Start, and rental assistance will not be impacted. But despite the White House’s claims, the Head Start reimbursement system was shut down in Connecticut yesterday, according to Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT). Head Start, which provides low-income children with access to preschool, “served 778,000 children in 2023.” Murphy said that the White House fact sheet was inaccurate and preschools in his state "cannot pay staff and will need to start laying off staff very soon and sending little kids home.” Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) posted on X that his staff had “confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night’s federal funding freeze.” Wyden called it a "blatant attempt to rip away health insurance from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.” The White House said that the Medicaid outage was simply a technical problem. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X that they were “aware of the Medicaid website portal outage” and the portal was expected to “be back online shortly.” The Medicaid website, however, warned of delays due to “executive orders regarding potentially unallowable grant payments.”

Nearly “a fifth of all Americans” receive health insurance through Medicaid.

The infamous federal funding freeze memo (that has since been temporarily stayed) is part of Trump’s plan to do an end-run around Congress and consolidate power in the Executive Branch.

See Also:

Chris Geidner at Law Dork:

It’s not great out there. Returning from vacation — and returning to America — I have felt a bit off since I got back. It took a minute to pin it down. It’s not that I wasn’t wanting to work. I needed a break, but I love what I do. In my final days in London, I was feeling invigorated about returning to it. It’s not that I wasn’t finding things I wanted to write about. There is always an unending supply of stories. That’s never been an issue for me — and certainly not these days. It was, instead, the clarity that came from literally escaping this country and the day-to-day crisis-building atmosphere that surrounds President Donald Trump — and then returning to it. Taking the frog out of the water for two weeks, as it were, and then throwing it back in the pot. Coming back to work on Thursday to the continued Epstein questions; the Texas redistricting lawlessness, which continues with absurd lawsuits; the failure of too many Democratic leaders to stand up to hate (Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg, I’m looking at you); the continued reality that the leaders of Congress aren’t standing up for their institution and that the majority on the Supreme Court isn’t, either; and the aggressive effort by the Trump administration to try and crush the institutions that still are pushing back was alarming. Then, on Friday, Trump ousted his own pick for the head of the Internal Revenue Service as a dispute over how much the agency should break the law in service of Trump was ongoing. Hours later, a shooter appears to have targeted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because of anti-vaccine radicalization. And there’s whatever the hell Trump thinks he is going to do to D.C.

Enter Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson. In her 35 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — a seat she was nominated for by then-president George H.W. Bush in 1990 after Kenneth Starr resigned from the bench to become solicitor general — the 81-year-old Henderson has been a constant, and at times sharp, conservative voice on the court as it skewed further left. And yet, while Henderson has gone along with many conservative and even Trumpian arguments over the years, she has on a handful of occasions in recent years proven immovable on certain points.

Most notably, Henderson rejected Trump’s immunity arguments in 2024 and his Alien Enemies Act arguments earlier this year. Then, on Saturday, she rejected his administration’s arguments in a case over “impoundment” — the administration’s unilateral decision not to spend money allocated by Congress. In all three cases, there is a common thread: Trump is seeking to upend — or, more clearly, ignore — the structural restraints inherent in our government, and Henderson took the position that he cannot do so. Specifically, in the two second-term cases, Henderson has stood up to the executive branch for the other branches. In March, Henderson stood up for the judicial branch. “The government argues that we may not even assess the lawfulness of its conduct,” she wrote of the Trump administration’s arguments in the original Alien Enemies Act proclamation case.

“At the outset, the government’s suggestion that judicial review of the Alien Enemies Act is categorically foreclosed is incorrect.“ She went on to detail how the administration “draws the mistaken inference“ from a past AEA case “that all questions of AEA authority are political and thus beyond the scope of judicial review.“ But, she continued, “that is not what the Court held.“