Ok ok we take it back

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Oh honestly, is this how it’s going to be? They throw a bomb, the shouting is too loud, they haul the bomb back? Government by toddlers?

The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants, according to a copy of a new memo obtained by The Washington Post, after the administration’s move to halt spending earlier this week provoked a backlash.

In a memo dated Wednesday and distributed to federal agencies, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, states that OMB memorandum M-25-13 “is rescinded.” That order, issued Monday, instructed federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.”

In other words they’re messing with us along with doing as much as they can get away with. Win-win for them.

The original White House order freezing federal grants, which became public on Monday, caused mass chaos and confusion across Washington, appearing to imperil government programs that fund schools, provide housing and ensure low-income Americans have access to health care. States reported issues accessing funds under Medicaid, and even as of Wednesday, public housing authorities reported being locked out of their funding portal. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that assistance for individuals would not be affected.

In other words she lied.

Comments

5 responses to “Ok ok we take it back”

  1. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    fund schools, provide housing and ensure low-income Americans have access to health care. States reported issues accessing funds under Medicaid, and even as of Wednesday, public housing authorities reported being locked out of their funding portal

    If they really want funds, they just need to go out and get rich, right? The targeting of the poor isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Neither Trump nor Musk gives one fig about the poor, and in fact probably figure they’re only there to make sure the rich get the cleaning services and so forth that they need…preferably free.

    This is likely to hurt a lot of MAGA-types. I know several of those that are reliant on federal money to survive – and not working for the feds, but getting money to help them because of poverty. Yet they voted Trump because they hate the same people he hates, and sort of think he isn’t going to do anything to hurt his base.

    I don’t feel sorry for them; they asked for it. But there are large swathes of poor that I do feel sorry for, because this is not what they voted for; they voted for the other team, who would have at least retained the programs that assist them. I feel sorry for the shrinking middle class, except, I don’t feel sorry for that portion that voted for Trump. It may not be nice, but they are getting exactly what they asked for – and unfortunately, so are we.

    Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. – Mencken

  2. Blood Knight in Sour Armor Avatar
    Blood Knight in Sour Armor

    Reminds me in passing of when Lenin paused collectivizing agriculture when it became clear it wasn’t as immediately useful as he thought.

    Then Stalin came through later and starved Ukraine…

  3. Rev David Brindley Avatar
    Rev David Brindley

    An interesting article from Salon, “MAGA’s true believers don’t understand capitalism — Trump will teach them a hard lesson.”

    The highlights

    America is a nation at war with its mythologies.

    For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism.

    (…)

    With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too many Americans have come to believe they are owed financial comfort and material abundance, not to mention eggs and gasoline at predictable prices.

    Dare I say it, but this strikes me as the “… the pursuit of Happiness.” from the Declaration of Independence writ large. But rewritten for today’s world meaning less the pursuit and more the entitlement.

    Jeremiads about grocery prices are now an acceptable element of political discourse and, per GOP logic, we have a right to complain about them. Feeding the hungry, though? That edges too close to pinko communism. But the point our fellow countrymen and women should grasp is that presidents, whoever they are, have very little control over inflation.

    You know what my wife and I did when household costs became too onerous last year? We reduced our expenses, and adjusted our quality of life.

    That’s, you know, fiscal conservatism: Tightening the belts, practicing austerity, living within our means, limiting debt. We didn’t literally pull ourselves up by the bootstraps or walk to school through the snow without shoes. But isn’t that the American mythos?

    Looks an awful lot like our local politics, too. People demanding governments do something about things over which governments no longer have control. On this day in 1953 an Adelaide butcher was fined for selling mutton at a price higher than the maximum mandated under The Prices Act. When I moved to South Australia in the 1970s the state government mandated maximum prices for a schooner of beer, a meat pie, and a pair of jeans. Could anyone contemplate a return to those days?

    So I’ll pose almost the same question nearly a decade later: What do Trump voters, and especially true believers in the MAGA community, of which I was once a full member, think capitalism is?

    We legislate against some of the baser traits of our nature: incitement, theft, violence. Our laws aren’t entirely devoid of protections against avarice (such as antitrust regulations), but Americans, collectively and historically, have a high tolerance for greed.

    There’s the mythology of capitalist meritocracy at work, which is still championed by many people who’ve been failed by both major political parties. Their concerns have been exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, rather than capitalism, is the source of their ills; that because of the evil policies of liberals, they keep working harder and harder but never seem to break even, much less get ahead.

    This is the great lie that so many people, like those of iknklast’s family, and people we all know, have fallen for and wholeheartedly believe. If you want to get ahead, you just have to work harder. Isn’t that why there are so many billionaire cleaners?

    The author, Rich Logis, is a former MAGAhat who has seen the naked emperor.

    https://www.salon.com/2025/01/26/magas-true-believers-dont-understand-capitalism–will-teach-them-a-hard-lesson/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user/Salon

  4. Blood Knight in Sour Armor Avatar
    Blood Knight in Sour Armor

    This isn’t even capitalism… as much as I find the phrase “late-stage capitalism” cringeworthy I think it might be starting to apply with the MAGA shitheads in Washington. There is no capitalism without the free market and the push and pull of market incentives.

    As an aside, American presidents have lots of control over inflation, it’s just uni-directional control. The stuff they’re doing is creating an inflationary time bomb. Maybe it’ll be fine, but it’s not like the much less drastic Biden stimulus wasn’t noteworthy in its inflationary effects. Then there’s all the knock-on effects of yanking foreign aid worldwide and generally destabilizing world trade. I shan’t confidently predict any future for this planet, but would anyone be surprised if the most devastating financial disaster of our lives is coming some time within the next decade? Or the next four years?

  5. Guest post: The mythology of capitalist meritocracy – Butterflies and Wheels

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