In one of his most audacious moves since taking office, President Trump ordered a freeze on Tuesday on trillions of dollars in federal money — from anti-poverty programs to foreign aid — in order to purge the government of what he called woke ideology.Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, discusses the order, the chaos it prompted and whether it is likely to survive in court.Guests: Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: A judge stayed President Trump’s freeze, but disruption to the Medicaid funding system caused fear.Uncertainty around the freeze also caused chaos in education.Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What did President Trump do to federal funding?
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. This week, President Donald Trump made one of the most audacious moves since he took office, freezing trillions of dollars in federal money, everything from anti-poverty programs to foreign aid, in order to purge the government of what he called woke ideology.
Today, my colleague, White House reporter Mike Scheer, on that order, the chaos that it prompted, and whether it is likely to survive in court. It's Wednesday, January 29th. So, Mike, President Trump has done something pretty remarkable. All of Washington, where you are right now, is talking about it.
I'm wondering if you can lay out for listeners exactly what he did and what's unfolded in the days since.
Right. It really was remarkable. Essentially, late in the day on Monday, President Trump's budget office, which is called the Office of Management and Budget, it reports directly to the president, they put out a memo, a really short memo. It was just two pages, but it essentially exploded in Washington the minute it went out.
Because what it did was it said that every single federal program that involves the delivery of money in the form of a grant or in the form of a loan, to any organization, any entity across the country had to be paused.
And I'm just going to read directly from the memo, and it said, "...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."
It said that all of the agencies had to pause the funds while they reviewed whether the programs in question, the loans and the grants, were, quote, consistent with the president's policies.
Okay, so basically the memo is saying all these federal funds go out to all of these programs all over the country. They need to be put on hold to make sure that none of them are actually at odds with the administration's agenda. Right.
That's right. And this is a lot of money, according to the administration's own figures, as much as $3 trillion. And the agenda that the memo says these programs must adhere to was really laid out by the president in a series of executive orders that we've all seen him announce over the course of the eight or nine days that he's been in office. And we know what those executive orders have been.
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Chapter 2: What was the immediate reaction to Trump's freeze?
You know, she really tries to explain that, no, there's a lot of these programs that are not going to be affected.
Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, food stamps, welfare benefits, assistance that is going directly to individuals will not be impacted by this pause.
It's essentially the White House trying to kind of reassure its own people that this big dramatic action by the president isn't going to sort of hit them in the pocketbooks directly. But the questions keep piling up.
How long is this pause going to last? Do you think there will be a list of who is affected and how much money is affected?
Medicaid. Is that affected? What about Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people? That's funded through money sent to the states by the federal government. Are you guaranteeing here that no individual now on Medicaid would see a cutoff because of the pause?
I'll check back on that and get back to you. John.
The White House later says that Medicaid is not impacted by the memo. But the problem is that the reality is actually happening more quickly than their statements can keep up with.
So you have the system by which state Medicaid offices log in to get their money from the federal government not only goes down, so all these states are locked out, but it goes down with a big red banner across the top that says, The system is down and we're delaying or canceling payments based on the president's executive orders.
So it becomes very clear very quickly that this memo has actually begun to have real world implications.
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Chapter 3: Which programs are affected by the freeze?
When all of this started going down on Tuesday, she decided to cancel class for Wednesday, essentially worried that if funding dried up from the federal government, it was unclear whether she could continue.
And so there have been those kinds of examples where people have actually taken steps to stop what they're doing out of fear that continuing could sort of violate these executive orders or what President Trump wants to do.
Right, so it sounds like mass confusion is at least the bare minimum of what was happening.
Yeah, chaos, confusion across the country. But at the same time, another thing is happening. A real effort to try to stop this whole thing from moving forward, both politically and legally.
We'll be right back.
So, Mike, tell us about the fights that have been brewing over this order since it was issued.
So the first fight that immediately happened was the political one. The scope of the damage that will be done is enormous. The Democrats on Capitol Hill immediately seized on this.
So as we stand here today, people should think about the mom who doesn't know if she can get her kid to child care today.
It's a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas. It is just outrageous.
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Chapter 4: How does the White House justify the funding pause?
how much money is spent, where that money is spent, and that, you know, essentially the executive, in this case, President Trump and his administration, is required, and the language in the Constitution is to faithfully execute the laws that are passed, right? And that by essentially holding back this money, President Trump was violating that basic precept of constitutional law.
So, in other words, the argument is Trump and the executive branch can't just suddenly take on a power that's always belonged to Congress.
That's right. And then another argument actually goes to a much more specific law, and that was the Impoundment Act of 1974. Okay, we're going to have to define that for people.
I do not know what that is.
Right. That was essentially part of the reform efforts after President Nixon had really pursued aggressively a kind of imperial presidency in which he would pick and choose the laws and the spending that he wanted to put into action after Congress had passed them. That
essentially provided the impetus for Congress to reassert its authority and say, no, no, no, if you had any doubt that the Constitution actually mandates that the executive branch must put into effect the laws that we passed, we're going to pass a law that actually says that and makes that very clear.
And Mike, what does the Trump administration say to these kinds of arguments that what he's doing here is illegal?
Essentially, they waved them aside. Carolyn Leavitt, the press secretary in her press briefing, essentially said, we disagree. Our lawyers think that what the president has done is perfunctory. perfectly legal. And part of their argument relies, I think, on the temporary nature of the pause.
And, you know, whether they're right or the other folks are right, obviously, is up for argument, will be argued in courts. But essentially, the White House position was we don't put any stock in the legal arguments against this. We're very confident.
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Chapter 5: What chaos ensued after the funding freeze announcement?
The judge said that she would rule in a more permanent way on February 3rd. So essentially, for a number of days, the president's effort here is at least temporarily blocked.
So does that mean a full pause on this entire effort?
It does, at least for the moment.
And you said they already mentioned that they were ready for this to go all the way up to the Supreme Court. Might it go that far? And what do you think will happen if it does?
So this feels like one of those moments in Washington where there is a real fundamental issue at stake, right? The question of the power of an executive to make a sweeping decision like this versus the power of Congress to essentially control and mandate that their laws are faithfully executed. In those moments when there are real clashes between executive and legislative power and
tends to be where the federal court system really does engage. And they do engage typically in a quick way. So it's hard to predict 100% what will happen and how this will play out.
But I think most people we've talked to believe that this will make its way pretty quickly to the Supreme Court and that the Supreme Court justices will likely take it up because it is in their interest to clarify and to rule on a pretty fundamental question of presidential power.
And do we have a sense of how the Supreme Court might rule?
Well, it's always hard to know, but I did talk to our colleague, Adam Liptak, who is our exceptional Supreme Court reporter.
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