Donald Trump's illegal Monday night order to freeze the disbursement of all congressionally appropriated federal funds will have sweeping negative consequences for millions of Americans, including unhoused veterans, seniors, and children.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, which is basically the human resources of the federal government, issued a memo Monday saying that all 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, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
Reports about the negative impacts of Trump’s funding freeze came fast and furious on Monday, showing that the blanket pause on spending—which is illegal under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974—will not only hurt the most vulnerable, but it could also impede law enforcement operations.
“Last night 500 pounds of meth were seized in Arizona thanks to federally funded programs that could see their funding paused under Trump’s unlawful order. This illegal action would seriously hamper the work of law enforcement agencies working to keep our communities safe,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes posted on Bluesky.
Sen. Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on Bluesky that states are reporting that they are unable to access portals to Medicaid, which provides health care to more than 79 million low-income people across the United States.
“Multiple states locked out of Medicaid portal. This is a Trump shutdown, except this time it’s unlawful,” he wrote.
Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, issued a memo listing the possible impacts of the spending freeze, including cuts to state food inspectors, K-12 schools across the country, federal student loans, small business loans, and more.
Marty Robertson unpacks food from Meals on Wheels in Ohio.
Meals on Wheels, which provides nutritious meals and companionship for 2.2 million seniors across the country every year, told HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney that "the uncertainty right now is creating chaos for local Meals on Wheels providers not knowing whether they should be serving meals today. Which unfortunately means seniors will panic not knowing where their next meals will come from."
According to Huffpost, Head Start programs received communication from the Trump administration that payments could be delayed due to the freeze. Head Start provides preschool and other services to nearly 800,000 low-income children, and a freeze in payments could cause providers to be unable to make payroll for their employees.
Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for the Washington Post, reported that a Northern California nonprofit that assists unhoused veterans by helping get them off the streets and into shelters will be unable to provide those services if federal grants are shut off.
“They are close to 100% funded by federal grants,” he wrote on X. “Official warned homeless veterans will get hurt if their grants are frozen, which they think appears likely under the OMB order.”
Topher Spiro, an Office of Management and Budget official during the Biden administration, said that the funding freeze will also cut off opioid prevention funding, funding for the suicide lifeline, HIV/AIDS treatment, and grants to help states address the bird flu outbreak.
In an attempt to stem the chaos created by its late-night memo, the Trump administration is now saying that the freeze is not across the board.
In a memo obtained by Stein, Trump’s OMB said that the freeze is “expressly limited to programs, projects, and activities implicated by the President’s Executive Orders, such as ending DEI, the green new deal, and funding nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest.”
The Green New Deal is not law, and thus no federal funds are tied to it.
The original memo announcing the freeze was not clear, and the Trump administration’s attempt to clean it up is a sign that it feared public backlash from the insane and lawless order.
“This is written in a very matter-of-fact way as if all this was clear from the original memo. It really was not,” NOTUS reporter Tara Golshan wrote on X.
What’s more, in the first daily White House press briefing of the new Trump administration, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that organizations need to personally ask budget chief nominee Russ Vought, who has yet to be confirmed, to get funds—even though Congress already appropriated the money, and the law says that Trump can’t cut off funding just because he wants to.
Already, a group of nonprofits filed an emergency lawsuit seeking to halt Trump’s freeze, arguing that the order is arbitrary and capricious and “fails even to acknowledge the catastrophic practical consequences that an immediate, across-the-board freeze on federal grant programs will produce, let alone to provide a reasonable explanation why those consequences could possibly be warranted merely to conduct a review of which ones ‘may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders.’”
“This Memo—made public only through journalists’ reporting, with barely twenty four hours’ notice, devoid of any legal basis or 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,” the lawsuit states.
Despite the fact that this is blatantly illegal and will hurt millions, Republicans are shrugging their shoulders about the pause.
"I think that’s normal practice at the beginning of an administration until they have an opportunity to view how the money is being spent,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters—a blatantly false statement.
Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said that the Trump administration should have taken a different approach to a spending freeze, but was ultimately nonplussed about the fact that Trump is trying to illegally cancel congressionally appropriated funds.
“There are a lot of federal programs that appear to be swept up in this order, and I think the administration needs to be more selective and look at a department at a time, for example,” she told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic. “But make sure that important direct service programs are not affected.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are hammering Trump and Republicans over the pause.
"Last night, President Trump plunged the country into chaos. Without a shred of warning, the Trump administration announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “In an instant, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars that directly support states, cities, towns, schools, hospitals, small businesses and most of all American families. This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas. It is just outrageous.”
"What happened last night is the most direct assault on the authority of Congress, I believe, in the history of the U.S. It is blatantly unconstitutional," Sen. Angus King, independent of Maine, told HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery. "If this stands, then Congress may as well adjourn."
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