Trump's Most Lawless Action Yet [View all]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-28-trumps-most-lawless-action-yet/



Donald Trump’s actions in his second term thus far can be slotted into three buckets: pardons, purges, and pauses. The pardons have gotten the most attention, and have damaged Trump politically, something likely to continue as the character of the rioters released comes to light. The purges have been noticed, too: Purges of Jack Smith’s prosecutorial team and USAID’s entire career staff leadership and 17 inspectors general and many more across the bureaucracy. These feel like a combination of raw vengeance and preparation, like the armed gang shooting out the closed-circuit cameras before commencing with the robbery.

But the pauses: Those need more attention. Because they are actually the most lawless, brazen, unconstitutional actions that this administration has yet taken, and if sanctioned by a conservative Supreme Court, they would amount to a full disbanding of our system of government.

This began with the day one executive order ending disbursement of so-called “Green New Deal” funding under the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. It continued with a pause on research grants at the National Institutes of Health and a pause on foreign aid, including the wildly successful bipartisan funding program treating AIDS in Africa, which has saved an estimated 25 million lives, and initiatives interdicting drugs coming in from Colombia. (Military funding for Israel and Egypt is exempted, making this a conscious choice rather than an across-the-board hiatus.) And now, as Marisa Kabas first reported, all federal grants and loans have been paused in a memo from Matthew Vaeth, the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget. This is supposed to go into effect at 5:00 p.m. today.



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.

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