Update: A federal district court just paused Tangerine 2.0's silly, dangerous freeze order. Exactly!
I'll have more later this evening, and but this first graphic is from 2016-17 state level attempts at it -- [new one now baked, below!]. . . .
I'm stuck in a meeting -- this is deplorable:
. . .States Say Medicaid Payments Pause as White House Defends Funding Freeze. . . .
President Trump's order freezing trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans seeks to eliminate all spending on programs that violate his partisan ideology. . . .
This is an attempt to use chaos -- to numb everyone out. I'll resist. He has zero power to impound or sequester prior Congressionally mandated funds flows -- ones the states have accepted, and relied upon.
Period.
Full stop. The border wall cases in the Ninth Cir. established that, in the 1.0 version of this lunacy.
. . .Just yesterday evening, reports surfaced that the Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum entitled “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.” Memo M-25-13 (hereinafter “the Memo”). The Memo purports to require every federal agency to temporarily pause “all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by [President Trump’s] executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal” -- effective today at 5:00 p.m. Memo M-25-13 at 2. In practice, the Memo purports to eradicate essentially all federal grant programs. Acting Director Vaeth’s only stated basis for doing so is his belief that “[f]inancial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities,” and that “[t]he 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. . . .”
This Memo -- made public only through journalists’ reporting, with barely twenty-four hours’ notice, devoid of any legal basis or even the barest rationale -- will have a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of grant recipients who depend on the inflow of grant money (money already obligated and already awarded) to fulfill their missions, pay their employees, pay their rent—and, indeed, improve the day-to-day lives of the many people they work so hard to serve. . . .
Although the Trump Administration is at liberty to “advanc[e] [its] priorities,” it must do so within the confines of the law. It has not. The Memo fails to explain the source of OMB’s purported legal authority to gut every grant program in the federal government; it fails to consider the reliance interest of the many grant recipients, including those to whom money had already been promised; and it announces a policy of targeting grant recipients based in part on those recipients’ First Amendment rights and with no bearing on the recipients’ eligibility to receive federal funds.
Given the few hours that remain before federal grantees are thrown into disarray, Plaintiffs file this Complaint and seek a temporary restraining order to maintain the status quo until the Court has an opportunity to more fully consider the illegality of OMB’s actions. . . .
[Previously,] OMB published in 2013 a notice of proposed rulemaking to revise and streamline guidance related to federal financial assistanceIn 2014, it published what is now known as the OMB Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance (“OMB Guidance” or “Guidance”) at title 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations (“CFR”). 79 Fed. Reg. 75867. The Guidance specifically requires federal agencies to “implement” the Guidance “in codified regulations unless different provisions are required by Federal statute or are approved by OMB.” 2 C.F.R. § 200.106. [Ed. Note: None of this was done, by Team Tangerine 2.0. Game over.]
The Memo marks the consummation of OMB’s decisionmaking process because it announces the agency’s decision to immediately suspend the obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance. The Memo is an action by which rights or obligations have been determined or from which legal consequences will flow because it purports to stop lawfully authorized obligations and disbursements that would be paid pursuant to valid federal grants. . . .
The man is a straight up malignant. . . loon. And a wanna-be dictator. Not on my watch -- NoSireeBob! Next hearing will be February 3, 2025, in DC, at 11 AM. . . Here's the order, as entered tonight. Grin.
नमस्ते
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