President Trump’s order freezing trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans is his most audacious attempt yet to remake the government in his image by seeking to eliminate all spending on programs that violate his partisan ideology.
“The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a two-page memo announcing the temporary halt.
The late-night order, which is set to take effect at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, sent officials at schools, hospitals, nonprofit organizations, research companies and many others into a frantic scramble to understand the extent of the directive and how quickly it could force them to halt activities funded in part by the federal government. Programs affected could include school lunch programs, Head Start, and federal infrastructure grants, among many others.
Legal scholars raced to assess whether the order’s vast sweep violates the requirement that the executive branch faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress — in this case the distribution of federal funds to virtually every corner of American life.
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote a letter Tuesday night to the acting head of Mr. Trump’s budget office.
“As leaders of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations,” they said, “we write with extreme alarm about the administration’s efforts to undermine Congress’s power of the purse, threaten our national security and deny resources for states, localities, American families and businesses.”
The answers to the legal and practical questions remain unclear. But there is little doubt that the order is a stark warning to Mr. Trump’s political adversaries: He has no intention of tinkering around the edges after returning to power with what he describes as a mandate to transform America.
In the budget office memo released late Monday night, the Trump administration said federal agencies must temporarily stop the “(i) issuance of new awards; (ii) disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards; and (iii) other relevant agency actions that may be implicated by the executive orders.”
It said the activities to be halted are any “that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
That message is embedded in almost everything that Mr. Trump has done in the eight days since retaking the presidency. His aides have said they are employing a flood-the-zone strategy in part to overwhelm the opposition to any single part of his agenda.
That opposition is already mobilizing. Lawyers representing the recipients of federal grants and loans promised quick legal action to challenge the president’s authority to impose a freeze on the spending in such a broad way.
