The second Trump administration is now two weeks old. Things are off to a rocky start. On Monday evening, the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, sent out a two-page memo to all federal agencies directing them to freeze all federal financial assistance programs to eliminate any perceived left-wing ideological goals. Things didn’t go according to plan—unless, of course, they did.
The original memo said that it sought to end the “use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” whatever that means. Follow-up OMB directives over the next few hours tacked on exemptions for some programs but gave no insight into when others would come back online. Lawmakers, especially among Democrats, denounced the moves as illegal and unconstitutional.
Chaos followed. The federal government disburses trillions of dollars each year to states, counties, cities, tribes, companies, nonprofits, and individuals. Failure to deliver that expected and allocated money would lead to layoffs at a wide range of organizations and businesses, put low-income Americans in dire financial straits, and wreck state and local budgets. A federal judge temporarily blocked the memo from taking effect on Tuesday. (More on that later.) Finally, on Wednesday, the White House formally rescinded it altogether. (More on that later as well.)
It’s hard to imagine that this was how things were supposed to go. For the last four years, Trumpworld claimed that it worked to create the policy infrastructure and staffing lists to hit the ground running in a second term. Memories of the first Trump administration’s ramshackle and haphazard early policy initiatives—the first few versions of the Muslim travel ban, the family separation program, and more—still haunted Trump loyalists. They hoped that, this time, their efforts would be more resilient to legal challenges and more effective at carrying out their goals.
In fairness, there are signs that Trumpworld learned some lessons from its first rodeo. Trump issued a flurry of significant executive orders in his first 48 hours in office, only a few of which face serious legal challenges. (Though some of the orders lay the groundwork for future policy actions that may or may not be lawful.) And some of the administration’s efforts, particularly when it comes to immigration and the civil service, are intentionally ambiguous or designed to create fear and uncertainty.
Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s top advisers, championed this “flood the zone” strategy over the years as a way to overwhelm the administration’s political adversaries, short-circuiting potential opposition. A late-night purge of the federal inspectors general, a sweeping pardon for January 6 rioters, an executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship—all came before Democrats could respond to the latest move or the media could cover it in depth.
But the OMB memo fiasco appears to be a sign that those first-term flaws remain inherent to the Trumpian system of rule. The poorly written and poorly executed directive undercuts the story that Trumpworld has told about how it spent its time in exile, quietly and meticulously planning the barnstorm beginning of its second term.
Trump’s vocal desire to return to power in 2024 meant that many of his top allies did not disperse throughout the business world or retreat back into private life after 2020. Instead, they formed their own think tanks and public interest law firms in Washington, D.C., as a government in waiting. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy guru, started the America First Legal Foundation to pursue those goals through litigation. Russell Vought, Trump’s once-and-future head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, founded the Center for Renewing America to craft policy strategies. Former lawmaker Jim DeMint’s Conservative Partnership Institute helped incubate and fund these new groups.
Top Trump allies told donors over the last four years that they were going to hit the ground running. “We have detailed agency plans,” Russell Vought said in a 2024 speech that was disclosed by ProPublica. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Part of this effort was a conscious desire to avoid the mistakes of 2017. Trump and his inner circle did not think he would win in 2016 and made few plans for victory until after it actually happened. It also didn’t help matters that they immediately shredded those few plans: The week after his shock election victory, Trump ousted former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as the head of his transition team and installed his adult sons and then–Vice President-elect Mike Pence to start anew.
This time around, Trump had a theoretical leg-up. Presidents who fail to secure a second term typically do not try again to return to the White House. Prior to Trump, the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms was Grover Cleveland. All other one-termers failed to mount a comeback bid; most of them in the nineteenth century and none in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries seriously attempted one. Having a coterie of advisers and policy experts already in waiting, funded by right-wing donors to think-tank their way into this moment, should have provided an edge.
Some of these efforts were aimed at resisting and undermining the Biden administration. But the bulk of their focus was on preparing for a possible return to power in 2024. One goal was to avoid the self-inflicted legal and procedural wounds that hamstrung Trump’s early policy initiatives. The crown jewel of this pseudo-Jacobite movement was Project 2025, one of the extensive policy reports prepared by the Heritage Foundation every four years in anticipation of a potential Republican presidency.
The latest quadrennial version of the report was perhaps its most ambitious yet: It laid out a comprehensive far-right plan to reshape American government and society by dismantling numerous federal regulatory agencies; purging nonpartisan civil servants in favor of ideologues; slashing taxes and regulations; ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; maximizing presidential power; and entrenching conservative Christian beliefs on sex, pornography, and reproductive rights into law.
Few of Project 2025’s policies enjoy popular support among Americans, and the holistic package became intensely toxic among voters. That led the Trump campaign to indulge in a bit of kayfabe, in which he pretended to denounce Project 2025; the constellation of groups that helped draft it, such as Miller’s AFLF, distanced themselves from the Trump campaign in turn. In mid-October, the Trump transition team leaked lists of “undesirable staffers” that would not be part of a future Trump administration, including “people linked to the Project 2025 policy blueprint”; it succeeded in getting credulous reporters to publish it as fact. It’s unclear how many people fell for these well-stage-managed rebukes; Project 2025 simply wrote down the exact policies that future Trump administration officials intended to pursue. As soon as the election ended, so did the aversion to it.
Was this all actually planned from the start? Perhaps in some form. The Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal reported on Wednesday that a confidential OMB document suggested the freeze was “part of a plan to provoke a court challenge over the Impoundment Control Act,” a 1974 law that forbids presidents from refusing to spend congressionally appropriated funds. Trump, as president-elect, previously floated the idea of using impoundments to snatch back the power of the purse from Congress.
Not only has the Supreme Court never endorsed the Trump–Project 2025 theory about impoundment, I noted at the time, all of its precedents on the budget process point in the opposite direction. Still, if this was the plan all along, it’s hard to square with performances like that of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who talked her way into a temporary restraining order for the Trump administration from a federal judge in Rhode Island.
Indeed, the Trump administration’s behavior over the past few days does not give the impression of a sleek, streamlined operation. After a federal judge in D.C. temporarily paused the order, the White House gave vague, confusing answers about whether the memo had been rescinded, whether the freeze had been lifted, and whether it was complying with the judge’s order. If the goal was to start a legal fight, the Trump White House seemed woefully unprepared for it.
Maybe this chaotic week was all part of the plan. Maybe an overzealous order caught the rest of the administration off-guard. More normal administrations and White Houses aren’t immune to some intergovernmental friction and confusion. Either way, if this week’s OMB fiasco was the end result of four years of cutting-edge thinking and meticulous planning from the Trumpian think-tank infrastructure, God help us if they ever have to improvise.
