The Reason Why Donald Trump Shut Down His Government
Washington’s newest pastime is counting the number of impeachable offenses Trump commits in his first 100 days. It’s a parlor game rather than a government proceeding because you don’t impeach a president less than three months into his term, and besides, the Republicans’ three-vote majority in the House means the House wouldn’t impeach Trump even if (in Trump’s own famous formulation) he were to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody.” On Tuesday Trump sat on Pennsylvania Avenue and shut off Medicaid, Head Start, and federal rental assistance, in blatant violation of the law, before a federal judge issued a one-week injunction against him.
No president in history—not even Trump in his first term—ever logged so many illegal actions in so short a time. On January 20, a public-interest group called Free Speech for the People called for Trump’s immediate impeachment based on his ever-bolder violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses, which included, just a few days before the inauguration, the selling of a crypto memecoin that increased Trump’s net worth by several billion dollars. It later added to its brief Trump’s January 6 pardons, which can be construed as Trump protecting himself from further investigation of his role in that 2021 insurrection. Trump’s executive order nullifying birthright citizenship (and therefore part of the Fourteenth Amendment) is another impeachable offense, blocked at the moment by a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan. Trump also fired about 17 inspectors general without providing the legally required 30 days’ advance notice and “substantive rationale” for their dismissal, and he ordered military units dispatched to the southern border, in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
The latest impeachable offense committed by history’s only twice-impeached American president is the issuing of a January 27 memorandum ordering the suspension, by 5 p.m. Tuesday, of all Federal financial assistance grants excepting Medicare, Social Security, and any grants issued directly to individuals. This, along with several earlier executive orders, including one to block funds to mitigate climate change under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which says the president can’t block the spending of dollars that Congress appropriates without the approval of Congress. This is not a close legal call. Trump’s previous violation of this law concerning aid to Ukraine prompted Trump’s first impeachment 11 months into his first term.
As I write, the whole world is trying to figure out precisely what spending was blocked by the January 27 memo now mooted (though only temporarily) by Judge Loren AliKhan of the D.C. District Court. The 1977 Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act makes a distinction between federal financial assistance and procurement, guaranteeing that the billions we pay Northrop Grumman to build Ford Class aircraft carriers that we don’t need will continue unabated. But there are ambiguities. When the federal government buys goods, that’s procurement. When it buys services, that’s maybe federal financial assistance and maybe procurement. Not even Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, who put his name on the January 27 memo, likely has a very clear understanding of where the dividing line is. Nor does Russell Vought, Trump’s yet-unconfirmed OMB nominee, who almost certainly dictated the memo to Vaeth. (On Tuesday a White House spokesperson all but confirmed Vought was running this operation.)
Vought also probably doesn’t care what the distinction is. That’s because, as with most Trump policies announced during the past week, the goal is to manufacture crisis to help Trump consolidate power. It’s a very old trick out of the authoritarian playbook—one that’s already prompted Politico editor John F. Harris, appallingly, to call Trump “the greatest American figure of his era.”
Are the grants that the federal government makes to states federal financial assistance? Apparently so. That spending includes Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the poor. The federal government spends nearly $600 billion annually on Medicaid. On Tuesday Senator Ron Wyden reported that Medicaid portals providing that money were shut down in all 50 states. So were at least some portals that provide money to the federal Head Start program, according to NBC News, and for rental assistance, according to The Washington Post. Also likely affected is the food stamp program, which sends $113 billion annually to the states.
Other programs that are potentially affected, according to NBC News and The Washington Post, include the federal school lunch program, the Women Infants and Children nutrition program, the Medicare enrollment assistance program, mine inspections, meat inspections, cancer research, bioterrorism defense, and the Interior Department’s wildfire preparedness program. (We’re all indebted, incidentally, to the independent journalist Marisa Kabas for breaking this story in her newsletter, The Handbasket.)
It’s possible the Trump administration never realized how much money the OMB memo would hold up. It is, after all, committed to the paranoid fantasy that the federal government is managed by an out-of-control Deep State. In fact, the number of civil servants working in the administrative state today is about the same as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. (According to Axios, Trump is offering them all a buyout to quit, though where the buyout money would come from is anybody’s guess.) Federal spending has grown tremendously since the mid-twentieth century, but that growth has been managed not by federal bureaucrats but by federal contractors, who outnumber federal employees more than two to one. Indeed, as Donald F. Kettl argues in the current issue of The Washington Monthly, we need more civil servants to supervise or replace these contractors, not fewer. (Incidentally, I strongly recommend the entire issue, which offers 10 ideas for Democrats to win back the working class, a topic dear to my heart.)
According to the Government Accounting Office, the federal government spent $759 billion on contracts in the 2023 fiscal year, $478 billion on services, and the rest on goods (mostly military hardware). Most if not all of that $478 billion likely constitutes federal financial assistance and is therefore now frozen. About half of the $478 billion purchases services for a single federal agency, the Pentagon, which makes it likely the OMB memo would bring a great deal of defense spending to a halt.
As the pandemonium spread Tuesday and various parties scrambled to block implementation of the OMB memo in the courts, the OMB issued a follow-up memo saying the only funds affected were those in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and other things Trump voiced opposition to in the many executive orders issued during his first week and a half in office. But that didn’t really help, because finding the offending expenditures in what may be as much as $3 trillion in spending covered by the memo—much of which was already shut off by the time the second memo came out—could hardly be achieved in one day. Safer just to sit on all the money lest an irate chief executive order you fired.
Even with Judge AliKhan’s injunction, this traffic accident will take some time getting cleaned up. We’ve seen partisan warfare in which Congress shut down the government. This is something new: a president shutting down his own government, just to see what would happen. Now he knows.
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