The Country Isn't Happy About Trump's Attempted Power-Grabs—He Just Backed Down From A Confrontation

“On Monday,” wrote Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby, “the Trump administration issued an extraordinary memo ordering federal agencies to indefinitely freeze the ‘disbursement of all Federal financial assistance,’ prohibiting federal agencies from spending money on congressionally authorized financial assistance programs until the Trump administration “reviews and approves each program” to root out anything they think is Marxist or supportive of transgenderism or the Green New Deal. “[T]he 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a program for up to 45 days if he first sends a message to Congress explaining why he believes funding should be rescinded.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.

Trump, however, has surrounded himself with a group of radical advisors who believe that the president has the Constitutional right to "impoundment." This is the theory that the president can cancel any federal program authorized by Congress by refusing to disperse the funds. As a result, Trump and his advisors believe the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is unconstitutional.

…Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) posted on Twitter 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 Twitter 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 “execute orders regarding potentially unallowable grant payments.”

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

Kyle Cheney dubbed this “the ‘try and stop me’ presidency. Trump, cheered on by compliant Republicans in Congress and confident in the ideological leanings of the Supreme Court, is using his first days in office to impose sweeping changes to the way government works and overwhelm traditional institutional checks on presidential power.” The Project 2025 authors and others who define Trump’s governance are eager for a standoff between Trump and a court— even the Supreme Court— trying to stop him as he pushes past legal boundaries or blows through them completely with his blizzard of executive orders. “‘Trump and others think they have a mandate to be bulls in a china shop,’ said Jed Shugerman, a legal expert and presidential historian from Boston University. ‘This time they’ve had years to think about going bold and also not worrying about the courts. There’s more flagrant disregard of what the Roberts court might do, and there’s a lot more chutzpah thinking that the Roberts court might wind up capitulating.’” The judge in this case may not appreciate this tweet:

This time, though, Trump backed down and canceled the OMB memo that had caused so much confusion and anger— as well as an admonition from a federal judge who put it on hold. Schumer, yesterday: “Donald Trump just rescinded his horrible OMB freeze. He should now rescind Russell Vought’s nomination for OMB. Russell Vought is the chief cook and bottle washer. We believe they’ll come back and try to do this in other ways.” 

After Trump’s white flag, Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, said that “The significant harms implicit in this overreaching order has led to its rollback. The incompetence and cruelty of this order caused nationwide confusion and anxiety, as across the country regular Americans spoke out about the human impacts— the loss of jobs, essential services, and harms to children among many other vulnerable populations— to name only a few. The White House overplayed their hand as they levied this Project 2025-inspired order, and made it clear that they want to sow chaos and gut programs that help families. We will keep up the fight to make sure that does not happen. Trump, Musk, Bannon and Vought have tried to create the impression that their agenda is inevitable. It is not. It was defeated this time and it will be again.”

As Don Kettl wrote for Bulwark readers, all it was all along was part of a high-speed power-grab seeking remark the federal government. “Of course,” he wrote, “this isn’t Trump’s handiwork; there is no evidence that he has thought deeply about the policy, law, or constitutional questions at stake. But people who work for him have planned on his behalf over the last four years out of power. Among these is Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, who founded one of several MAGA-friendly think tanks in Washington, the Center for Renewing America, and who contributed to Project 2025. Vought is a zealot among zealots, as his perfervid contribution to Project 2025 makes clear: ‘Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.’”

Greg Sargent wrote that admitting failure is anathema to the authoritarian leader, who is perpetually in danger of being diminished by those who are resentful of his glory— which is why White House adviser Stephen Miller is frantically searching for scapegoats to blame for the unfolding disaster around Trump’s massive freeze on federal spending.” Miller tried blaming the whole thing on the media, furious that “the media covered this fiasco aggressively and fairly. Miller insists that the press glossed over the funding pause’s supposed exemption for ‘aid and benefit programs.’ But this is rank misdirection: The funding freeze, which is likely illegal, was indeed confusedly drafted and recklessly rolled out. This is in part what prompted the national outcry over the huge swath of programs that it threatened, Medicaid benefits included—and the media coverage that angered Miller.

Sargent points out that “All of which carries a lesson for Democrats: This is what it looks like when the opposition stirs and uses its power in a unified way to make a lot of what you might call sheer political noise. That can help set the media agenda, throw Trump and his allies on the defensive, and deliver defeats to Trump that deflate his cultish aura of invincibility. ‘This has been a red-alert moment for weeks—but now no one can deny it,’ Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who has argued for an emergency footing against Trump, told me. ‘For my colleagues that didn’t want to cry wolf, the wolf is literally chomping at our leg right now.’”

Until this crisis, the Democratic opposition has mostly been relatively tentative and divided. Democrats were not sufficiently quick, forceful, or unified in denouncing Trump’s illegal purge of inspectors general and his deranged threat to prosecute state officials who don’t comply with mass deportations. Internal party debates suggest that many Democrats believe that Trump’s 2024 victory shows voters don’t care about the dire threat he poses to democracy and constitutional governance, or that defending them against Trump must be reducible to “kitchen table” appeals.

But the funding-freeze fiasco should illustrate that this reading is highly insufficient. An understanding of the moment shaped around the idea that voters are mostly reachable only via economic concerns— however important— fails to provide guidance on how to convey to voters why things like this extraordinary Trumpian power grab actually matter.

…“It is hard for us to argue that our democracy is falling if we’re helping to confirm all of his nominees,” Murphy told me. “Taking too much of an à la carte approach to Trump’s abuses of power also risks squandering leverage… People will not take us seriously if we don’t do our jobs every day like we’re in the middle of a constitutional crisis,” Murphy told me. “Today, everybody understands that he’s trying to seize power for corrupt purposes. But tomorrow, we have to start acting with purpose to stop what he’s doing.” If you doubt the efficacy of this, Stephen Miller’s anger confirms it as clearly as anyone could want.