Trump tries a January coup -- again
The president wages war on the separation of powers
Conservative activist and amateur comedian Grover Norquist famously joked in a 2001 interview that he planned to spend the next 25 years making the federal government small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And here we are, with the Trump Administration moving this week to paralyze a wide swath of critical government programs by abruptly cutting off their funding.
This is no mere bureaucratic adjustment. This story, first reported by Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket, is best understood in the context of something else that happened this past week: the mass pardon of the more than 1,500 insurrectionists who tried to seize the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and overturn a free and fair election.
What’s happening here is, as Daniel Hunter of the group Choose Democracy put it, a coup. This is Trump’s second coup attempt.
As Hunter writes:
It's an administrative coup. Trump has ordered tens of billions (maybe up to $3 trillion) of budget halted indefinitely in a blatantly illegal move. He's claiming power to halt and potentially redirect funding that's already been authorized by Congress — a classic authoritarian move.
As David Dayen writes over at The American Prospect, this coup works by striking directly at all the stuff the government does to make a real difference in people’s everyday lives:
The pause would include student loan payments to universities, grants for basic research, grants to state and local governments for a wide variety of purposes, and much more. The OMB memo claims that Social Security and Medicare benefits are exempted by the order, as well as grants delivered specifically to individuals, like Pell grants or veterans’ benefits. It’s unclear how much money is at stake, but it could range into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The spending freezes have already paralyzed foreign aid, stalled medical research funded by the NIH (the world’s biggest funder of medical research) and funding for basic science by the NSF, and halted ongoing efforts against AIDS by the PEPFAR program (the crowning achievement of the George W. Bush administration and possibly the most successful foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan). In short, the White House has launched an attack on the institutions that have made America an economic powerhouse and the institutions that help maintain global order.
You could look at that as fulfilling the nativist impulses of the MAGA movement, but this all culminated in a bizarrely worded two-page memo from the Office of Management and Budget (headed by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought), refusing to spend the great majority of the money currently allocated for domestic programs.
As Senator Ron Wyden points out, this is attacking the programs that keep people alive. And it is not a hypothetical. It’s happening now:
My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night's federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health care from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.
The original memo is brief and unclear, but the language suggests that it disrupts not just Medicaid (which provides healthcare to some 80 million Americans) but programs like SNAP and WIC (which provide food aid for families and children), FAFSA (financial aid for college), Medicare (which serves another 65 million people), and more — the programs that keep people healthy and safe, and let them build futures.
As Shannon Pettypiece and Julie Tsirkin report for NBC, the OMB sent another memo, asking for a huge range of agencies to prove their funding didn’t support programs that didn’t align with the White House’s agenda of blocking diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, stifling discussion of abortion, and so forth:
It’s not clear exactly which programs will be halted, but OMB also sent a separate document, asking federal agencies that provide financial assistance, for details on more than 2,600 programs, including:
School meals for low-income students
The WIC nutrition program for pregnant women and infants
Wildfire preparedness for the Department of Interior
The Medicare enrollment assistance program
USAID foreign assistance
Mine inspections
A reintegration program for homeless veterans
This is much more serious than the tentative media language about a “pause” in spending indicates. Much of the reporting by the mainstream press on this memo has failed to transmit the gravity of the situation. But even if The Washington Post’s headline — “White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion” — suggests a bureaucratic snafu, the report cites Senator Chuck Schumer pointing to the real legal problem at the heart of Trump’s moves: the fact that this is an attempt to disable the legislative branch and seize omnipotence for the executive. That is to say, it’s a coup.
They say this is only temporary, but no one should believe that,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement. “Donald Trump must direct his Administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people. Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.
Trump and his team are using a strategy called “impoundment” (basically refusing to spend money that had already been legally allocated by Congress). Impoundment had been used occasionally going back to Thomas Jefferson’s administration but was most widely and infamously employed by Richard Nixon. Congress found Nixon’s use of the tool so beyond the pale that it pushed back on it and asserted its constitutional prerogative with a law, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
Congress passed the ICA in response to President Nixon’s executive overreach – his Administration refused to release Congressionally appropriated funds for certain programs he opposed. While the U.S. Constitution broadly grants Congress the power of the purse, the President – through the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and executive agencies – is responsible for the actual spending of funds. The ICA created a process the President must follow if he or she seeks to delay or cancel funding that Congress has provided.
Nixon had tried to block Congress when it did things — passed laws — that he didn’t like or disagreed with. And in that context, David Dayen goes on to lay out exactly why what Trump and Vought are attempting to do here is not just dangerous, but illegal. This is breaking the law, pure and simple — illegal and unconstitutional.
To state clearly, Congress has the constitutional power of the purse. Presidents can sign or veto a budget; that’s the extent of their role. After that, they must take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Refusing to spend money because of a policy preference is the opposite of faithful execution. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 1988 agreed that there just isn’t any authority for presidents to defy appropriated funding.
How is government meant to work? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that agencies are meant to call OMB director Russell Vought and ask, hat in hand.
Not only is there no possibility of actually running a government this way, but this is all going on, as Donie O’Sullivan and Katelyn Polantz reported for CNN, as the Trump White House attempts to erase the historical record of the January 6 coup.
As President Donald Trump this week sought to rewrite the history of his supporters’ attack on the US Capitol, a database detailing the vast array of criminal charges and successful convictions of January 6 rioters was removed from the Department of Justice’s website.
States are pushing back already. That pressure is what America needs now. All is not lost. During the first Trump administration, as William E. Nelson writes at The Conversation, public and governmental pressure got the administration to walk back the shutdown.
The shutdown illustrated what some advocates have long wanted: a shrunken government. And it was an experiment that, as the above examples and many others illustrate, was not viable. Public pressure forced the reopening of the government – at the same size it was before the shutdown.
This was a coup, plain and simple. More than the last one, it must be clearly answered.
So it's illegal - and what exactly is the legal remedy? Who files the lawsuits (and are they doing it)? Do these get appealed to ... SCOTUS? If so, what happens to the distribution of these funds in the meantime if lapdogs like Speaker Johnson refuse to act? What a nightmare.
Update: I just saw that a collection of AG's led by Tish James (NY) had a press conference today and are demanding an immediate block to OMB's freeze.
To whom will opponents of this flagrant violation of law by the executive branch appeal for correction? The lives and welfare of countless people, citizens and non-citizens, are in jeopardy.