This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 29 episode of “All In With Chris Hayes,” guest hosted by Ali Velshi.
If you have spent the past few weeks feeling helpless, like there was no way to stop what was coming out of Donald Trump’s White House this time around, it appears as though critics of the administration have held the line.
We often forget that Trump has frequently been cowed by public opinion when it turns against him.
After major backlash, Trump’s radical plan to freeze government spending is on hold. Now, it’s all very confusing and somewhat opaque — which, under Trump, is by design — but here’s what appears to have happened:
It was an odyssey that started after Trump’s inauguration last Monday. Shortly after he was sworn in, the president signed a slate of executive actions targeting “wokeness” and diversity in the government. How to carry out many of those orders fell to Trump’s allies in the Office of Management and Budget, the agency that manages the day-to-day running of the federal government and disburses its money.
On Monday, the OMB issued a two-page memo full of MAGA buzzwords that appeared to bring the entire machine of government to a halt. “Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders,” the memo read.
That sounded like an order to freeze all government spending, essentially a de facto shutdown. And why? According to the memo, it was so Trump’s bureaucrats could vet every dollar the government spends to find outlays that “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”
If that sounds reckless, that’s because it is. It’s also unconstitutional. A president cannot simply refuse to spend money that Congress already authorized in the budget.
Many Republicans defended the order anyway and tried to play down the controversy — but that didn’t work. The freeze was already causing chaos and confusion among government workers and nonprofits all over the country that depend on federal funds to keep running.
The director of Head Start said hundreds of thousands of the nation’s neediest families might lose their services. Housing organizations warned that the freeze meant low-income households might miss paying their rent and could face eviction. Medical researchers worried that a freeze could halt ongoing clinical trials into serious diseases.
Then there was Medicaid, the federal health insurance for more than 70 million poorer Americans — roughly a fifth of the country. On Tuesday, Medicaid administrators across the country found that the portal they used to access payments was blocked. After that fact was brought to the Trump administration’s attention, the Medicaid portal suddenly worked again.
White House press secretary Karoline Levitt told reporters that direct assistance to Americans would continue to flow during the freeze. But she couldn’t answer direct questions about one of the biggest, most important assistance programs.
When Levitt was asked whether Medicaid was affected, she responded, “I gave you a list of examples — Social Security, Medicare, welfare benefits, food stamps — that will not be impacted by this federal pause. I can get you the full list after this briefing from the Office of Management and Budget.”
You could tell the Trump White House was feeling the heat from this self-made crisis. We often forget that Trump has frequently been cowed by public opinion when it turns against him. And this time around, he wasn’t keen on being blamed for grandmothers, veterans and children missing their benefits. So early Wednesday afternoon, the Trump administration seemed to reverse itself. It rescinded that OMB memo that set off the spending freeze — a move made easier by the fact that a federal judge had already halted it Tuesday night because, again, it is unconstitutional. A widespread backlash, from politicians but also from activists, nonprofits, lawyers and everyday people, forced this reversal. Later in the day, Trump tried to clean up the mess that his own orders had made. “As was explicitly stated, this in no way affected Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or other entitlements that Americans depend on,” Trump said from the White House. “I’m restating right now to correct any confusion that the media has purposely and somehow for whatever reason created: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid have not been affected by any action we’ve taken in any way, shape or form,” he added. But do not miss what happened here: A widespread backlash, from politicians but also from activists, nonprofits, lawyers and everyday people, forced this reversal. For its part, the White House says reversal only applies to that OMB memo. Trump’s executive orders on federal funding “remain in full force and effect,” it says. It will, no doubt, try again. But now we know this administration can be resisted. Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
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