Donald Trump decided that he could put a "pause" on paying all of America's in-house bills and over the course of the day everything went from "this is concerning" to "we are suddenly already near total societal collapse."
One of the big problems with being alive today, besides the fact that there is an all-out war to prevent trans people from existing, is having to learn so much “how a bill becomes a law”–type stuff — and today’s lesson is about “impoundment.” Sadly, you also have to learn about rescission, the process by which the president must tell Congress why he wants to not spend the money Congress already said they were going to spend. After that, Congress can ignore the president for 45 days and spend it anyway. Sorry, we know we’re too pretty to have to know about these things. But that was back when we followed rules!
“He can’t do that” (although he actually can’t) is the foolish response we have to beat out of ourselves because he always will. The Project 2025 people got hired and are causing mayhem, as the government spent the last 24 hours demanding literally everyone inside every agency — from the Lead Based Paint Capital Fund Program to the partnership between the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement and AmeriCorps to Tax Counseling for the Elderly — assess their spending and grant-making. Does any funding place an “undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources”? Or contain any support of “environmental justice” or “gender ideology”? Good-bye, good luck.
Over the course of the afternoon, a number of federal agencies and partners suddenly realized they were locked out of the Medicaid reimbursement payment portals, even though Medicaid was supposed to continue in the "pause"; the DHHS funding website currently declares it is “taking additional measures to process payments.” Good news! A spokesperson for the White House said they’d look into it.
