General Discussion

Remember eight years ago, when Trump launched an ugly and poorly thought-out Muslim ban, sparking outrage, bureaucratic chaos, family hardships, and messy legal fights?

Eight years to the day later, he did it again with an ugly and poorly thought-out spending freeze.

Exactly eight years to the day later, Trump’s budget office ordered a freeze to federal grants, loans and related assistance — money that Congress has already appropriated — effectively trying to transfer the power of the purse away from lawmakers. A massive national freak-out soon followed, with widespread confusion and chaos, even among the administration’s allies, about how to implement the White House’s policy.

With just minutes remaining before the freeze was scheduled to take effect, U.S. District Court Judge Loren AliKhan agreed to halt the process. NBC News reported:

A federal district judge on Tuesday granted an administrative stay in a case challenging the Trump administration’s planned freeze of federal aid, pausing the plan for a week and setting a hearing for further arguments Monday morning. The order applies only to the pause of disbursements in open grants, Judge Loren AliKhan said. And it doesn’t get into the legality of the freeze; instead, it gives her time to hear more fleshed-out arguments from a coalition of nonprofit groups about why she should issue a temporary restraining order that could block the freeze for an additional two weeks.

......It began with a terribly written memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie accurately described as “delusional.” White House officials spent much of the day insisting that it was perfectly clear, and news organizations were to blame for any confusion, but many of those same White House officials struggled badly to answer specific questions about the details of the policy — most notably related to the impact on Medicaid beneficiaries. (“I’ll check back on that,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at her first briefing.).....

In case that weren’t quite enough, the White House also spent much of the day defending the freeze by referencing the “Green New Deal,” which is a broad progressive agenda that, in reality, never actually passed — and therefore can’t be defunded.

The resulting image was unsettling. On the one hand, the president, his political operation and his policy team are engaged in ugly and legally dubious power grabs, wreaking havoc as part of a radical scheme to transform the American system.

On the other hand, these guys still don’t know what they’re doing. As The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank summarized in his latest column, “In just eight days on the job, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the federal government, and he and his aides apparently couldn’t be bothered to give any thought to the damage and chaos that would ensue.”