The Key Programs Trump’s Budget Freeze Just Wrecked

The Trump administration’s budget freeze on federal grants and loans will affect more than 2,600 accounts across the government. Beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, tens of billions of dollars directed to the likes of the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, FEMA, and thousands of other agencies will be put on pause until the government falls in line with Trump’s agenda.

In a memo issued Monday, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Matthew Vaeth said that the funds—which Congress appropriates—would be frozen until the White House could ensure that each agency was aligned with Trump’s recent executive orders and had ended operations related to foreign aid, DEI initiatives, “woke gender ideology,” and the Green New Deal.

“This temporary pause will provide the Administration time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of the funding for those programs consistent with the law and the President’s priorities,” Vaeth wrote.

Agencies will be required to answer specific questions and submit their responses to OMB in order to regain their funding. Some of those questions include prompts about whether the programs promote or support “environmental justice,” abortion, or “gender ideology,” or provide services to “illegal aliens,” according to a spreadsheet obtained by RollCall.

Essential services across the nation will, more or less, be paralyzed by the probe. Among the several thousand funding programs that Trump’s White House is investigating are funding through the Department of Health and Human Services for rural and teaching hospitals; grants for veteran suicide prevention efforts; NASA’s space operations; Justice Department funding for victims of mass violence and terrorist attacks; and Pentagon research into chemical, biological, and radiological warfare. Subsidies for housing assistance, disaster relief, and educational programs are also threatened.

But the spontaneous mass spending pause has also left organizations and programs dependent on federal funding confused about whether they’re implicated.

By Tuesday at noon, multiple states reported that they had been locked out of their Medicaid portals amid the nationwide holdup, according to Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz. And money intended to feed the elderly and infirm also appears jeopardized, leaving groups such as Meals on Wheels unsure about when they’ll be able to deliver food again.

“The uncertainty right now is creating chaos for local Meals on Wheels providers not knowing whether they should be serving meals today,” a Meals on Wheels America spokesperson told HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney. “Which unfortunately means seniors will panic not knowing where their next meals will come from.”

And the chaos seemingly extends to people within Trump’s immediate orbit. In response to concerns about Meals on Wheels, senior administration officials told Delaney that “no benefits to individuals are affected by this—funding specifically that violates the president’s EOs.” The meal program isn’t a direct benefit, though, but rather a string of grants disseminated through states and local nonprofits.

“They don’t think they’re OK,” Delaney reported.

Trump’s spokespeople have insisted that direct services to people would not be affected, but Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy implored his state’s residents to not believe any such statements. He wrote on X that “the Head Start reimbursement system IS shut down” across the Constitution State.

“Preschools cannot pay staff and will need to start laying off staff very soon and sending little kids home,” Murphy said in response to an updated OMB memo specifying that Pell Grants, Head Start, SNAP, and similar programs weren’t nixed by the directive.

Legal experts and lawmakers alike clamored that the agency’s move to freeze spending from hundreds of agencies overnight—and Trump’s ongoing attempt to forcibly reshape the government—wasn’t just a dangerous and unprecedented attack on the rights of millions of Americans, but one that is blatantly illegal.

“On day one, Trump made crystal clear he has every intention of ignoring federal law—and our Constitution—to block investments that Congress has delivered for communities across the country,” Senator Patty Murray, vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement last week following Trump’s executive order foreshadowing the funding freeze. “What’s happening here should be alarming to anyone who cares about the separation of powers clearly laid out in our Constitution. Congress—not the president—has the power of the purse.”

In a statement late Monday, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer similarly pressed that the executive branch does not have the authority to withhold funding that the legislature had already allocated for the American public.

“Donald Trump’s administration is jeopardizing billions upon billions of community grants and financial support that help millions of people across the country,” Schumer wrote on X. “It will mean missed payrolls and rent payments and everything in between: chaos for everything from universities to non-profit charities, state disaster assistance, local law enforcement, aid to the elderly, and food for those in need.”

A coalition of nonprofits and small businesses filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the suspension.

This story has been updated.

Newly appointed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is in New York City cosplaying as an ICE agent.

“Here in New York City this morning, we are gettin’ the dirtbags off these streets,” said Noem, wearing an official ICE bulletproof vest over her jacket in a video captioned “7 AM in NYC. Getting the dirt bags off the streets.” (An earlier version of the post with a misspelling of dirt bags was deleted.)

The post came as the Department of Homeland Security began conducting ICE raids in New York City Tuesday morning as part of President Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

“Just now. Enforcement operation in NYC. Criminal alien with kidnapping, assault & burglary charges is now in custody—thanks to ICE,” Noem wrote in a different post that same morning. “Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.” The video attached to the post showed ICE agents leading a man away in cuffs at around 6 a.m.

ICE, DHS, and other federal agencies have been posting pictures of arrests and keeping daily tallies of those arrested. A similar process occurred in Chicago two days ago, and the Trump administration is looking to do the same in every major city.

“My goal is to arrest as many public safety and national security threats as possible and move on to the other priorities,” Immigration czar Tom Homan told CNN on Sunday.

Noem will be leading the “counterterrorism” part of DHS’s efforts. A longtime Trump advocate, Noem even sent her state’s national guard all the way to the southern border while she was governor of South Dakota last year, ignoring her state while it was flooding.

Idaho’s House of Representatives is asking the Supreme Court to undo its decision on same-sex marriage.

The state legislature chamber voted 46–24 Monday in favor of passing House Joint Memorial 1, calling on the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges “and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”

State Representative Heather Scott, a Republican who sponsored the memorial, provided flimsy reasoning behind the measure, saying that the power to define marriage belonged to the states.

“I would ask you to substitute any other issue and ask yourself, ‘Do I want the federal government creating rights for us, for Idahoans?’” Scott said during debate on the floor of the state legislature, according to the Idaho Capitol Sun.

“So, what if the federal government redefined property rights or nationalized water rights?” Scott said. “What does that look like if they came up with some new fair use policy or came up with different ways to define property rights? That is not a decision for the judges; it is a decision for the states.”

But the memorial specifically urged the Supreme Court to define marriage, not what the states control.

Scott also claimed that Obergefell undermined religious freedoms and that Christians were being “targeted.”

Monday’s measure was developed by MassResistance, an anti-LGBTQ hate group that is sowing trans panic in state legislatures across the country.

Despite opposition on both sides of the aisle, including 15 Republicans who joined every House Democrat, the GOP was still able to pass the measure because it holds a supermajority in the legislature. The memorial will now head to the Republican-controlled state Senate, and, if it passes, it will become law without needing the governor’s signature.

But a memorial is more of a formal letter than a law, and it carries no enforcement power.

If the measure becomes law, it’s not clear that the Supreme Court would even be compelled to take up Idaho’s question—but it would certainly send a message to the LGBTQ residents of that state.

In 2006, Idaho voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that said that “marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.” That law was ruled unconstitutional in 2014, the year before Obergefell effectively legalized same-sex marriage by ruling that it was discriminatory to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses.

While the Respect for Marriage Act requires all states to recognize same-sex marriage performed in other states, the right to same-sex marriage was never formally legalized on the federal level. So if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, gay marriage rights would go with it.

Donald Trump’s administration has been hit with a lawsuit over allegedly collecting federal employee information and directing it to an employee of Elon Musk.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Monday, alleges that employee data is going to Amanda Scales, who, according to LinkedIn, works for xAI, a private corporation of which Musk is the CEO. This would violate federal laws on transparency and put the sensitive information of federal employees into the hands of a private corporation.

The lawsuit states that Trump administration officials created an email address, hr-at-opm-.gov, and directed federal employees, through the Office of Personnel Management, to treat it as legitimate. OPM is the agency tasked with managing the federal workforce and could be described as Human Resources for federal employees.

A Reddit post to r/fednews, a subreddit dedicated to the federal workforce, alleged on Monday that the address is based at an email server that was recently set up at the OPM offices. The post was later deleted, but a copy of its contents were cited in the lawsuit.

Last week, the new OPM email address sent out test emails to every single federal employee, catching many workers off-guard, some of whom even flagged the emails and address as spam.

The lawyer behind the lawsuit is Kel McClanahan, the executive director of National Security Counselors, which also brought legal challenges against Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last week. He told CNN that OPM has been hacked in recent years and a new email server without proper oversight would put employees’ personal data at risk.

“Plugging in a new email server for the sole purpose of sending messages directly to every federal employee is an invitation to be hacked, and every employee out there needs to know how much of their data is at risk,” McClanahan said. He added that it should be shut down “until OPM treats this data with the security it warrants.”

Nineteen Republican attorneys general have decided that now is the perfect time to declare war on Costco to convince the bulk retailer to abandon its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird are spearheading the effort. They wrote a letter Monday to Costco chief executive Ron Vachris, essentially accusing Costco of reverse racism and giving the company 30 days to repeal its DEI policies or explain why it hasn’t. The letter claims that Costco’s policies go against the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling repealing affirmative action.

Other major retailers, including Walmart, Amazon, and Target, have capitulated to the right-wing culture war on DEI. But even after Trump’s victory, a whopping 98 percent of Costco shareholders rejected an anti-DEI measure last week.

Donald Trump’s new names for Alaska’s Mount Denali and the Gulf of Mexico will soon be realized in Google Maps.

The massive, multinational corporation announced Monday that it would bend to an executive order, signed by Trump on his first day back in office, renaming the highest peak in the United States “Mount McKinley” and branding the ocean basin the “Gulf of America.”

“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” the company wrote in a statement on X. “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

That means the intra-app change will be made whenever the United States Geological Survey, an agency within the Department of the Interior, officially reclasses the pair of landmarks in its geographic names information system, or GNIS.

“When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America,” Google wrote in a separate post.

The updated names will only be reflected for Google Maps users within the United States, according to the company. Users in Mexico will see their own local name for the gulf, while everyone in the rest of the world will see both names.

The continent’s highest mountain was called Denali—“the high one” or “the great one”—for centuries by the Koyukon Athabaskans, the original inhabitants of Alaska. The mountain’s native name existed centuries before a gold prospector unofficially named the peak after William McKinley during the Ohio politician’s 1896 run for president.

The federal government made “Mount McKinley” official in 1917, 16 years after McKinley’s assassination, but it hasn’t always been the preferred option for Alaskan locals. In 1975, the Alaskan legislature officially petitioned the federal government to have the mountain’s name reverted back to Denali, only to have the effort blocked by Ohio.

President Barack Obama pushed past that in 2015 during a sweep of landmark renamings intended to better reflect the names used by America’s Indigenous tribes, officially classing the mountain as “Denali” in federal documents.

In December, Trump suddenly revived the debate, telling a crowd of supporters in Arizona that he would “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it”—but the news was not received well by Alaska’s leadership.

“There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali—the Great One,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote on X.

Donald Trump is claiming that he sent the U.S. military to turn on the water in California, even though it never happened.

Trump posted on Truth Social Monday night to receive credit for his supposed good deed.

“The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,” Trump wrote. “The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”

But despite what Trump says, he is not a river to his people. Within a few hours, California’s Department of Water Resources published a fact-check on the president’s false claim that the U.S. military had forcibly turned on the water.

“The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful,” California’s DWR posted on X early Tuesday.

Mike McGuire, a state senator from California’s Northern coast, pulled apart the president’s post, baseless claim by baseless claim.

“BS Alert,” McGuire wrote in a post on X. “First off, shocker, water from the Pacific Northwest doesn’t flow to the Central Valley. Second, federal water pumps were down for repair and are now back on. Third, rest assured, the military has not invaded the delta. Facts are hard.”

Over the weekend, Trump signed an executive order in response to the wildfires affecting Los Angeles County directing federal officials to “immediately take actions to override existing activities that unduly burden efforts to maximize water deliveries” in an effort to fix California’s “disastrous” water policies.

In the order, Trump also threatened to cut off funding from the state’s land and water management and disaster response, thereby ending “the subsidization of California’s mismanagement.” California Governor Gavin Newsom told NBC News that the premise of this executive order was “false.”

Last week, Newsom torched Trump’s limp criticism of California’s water policies after he falsely claimed that “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn the valve.”

“Maybe the president doesn’t know that there’s not a spigot that can be turned that can solve all the water problems that he alleges exist, that don’t exist when it comes to the state water project here in California,” Newsom said.

The Donald Trump administration has stopped a program that distributes an anti-HIV drug in poor countries. 

The halt is part of the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid last week, and instructs organizations overseas to stop distributing HIV medications bought with U.S. aid, even if they have already been acquired and have made it to local clinics. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, started by George W. Bush, is part of the freeze, even though it’s credited with saving over 25 million lives since it began. 

Last week, the administration stopped PEPFAR’s funding from moving to clinics, hospitals, and other organizations around the world. Now appointments are being canceled with patients being denied access to clinics. HIV patients’ ongoing treatment has come to a stop. And in this atmosphere of chaos, federal government officials have been ordered by the White House not to speak with partners outside of government, fueling worry and confusion. 

In addition, U.S. officials were told not to speak with their counterparts in foreign governments’ ministries of health, which could lead to worsening relations overseas. All of this follows an order issued to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Sunday night to stop all communications with the World Health Organization, including being present in the same real or digital meeting rooms. 

Officials around the world were told that PEPFAR’s data systems would shut down at 6 p.m. EST Monday, shutting off access to all data sets, reports, and analytical tools. The program’s official website has been taken down, although the State Department’s PEPFAR website is still up as of Tuesday morning.  

Some Republicans have opposed PEPFAR for years, arguing that it encourages abortions, but it was still given a one-year renewal last March. An interruption to the program could have drastic consequences for the spread of HIV and AIDS overseas. 

Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long been a skeptic of public health programs and the WHO. These actions, coupled with Kennedy’s other plans if he’s confirmed, could have horrific effects on public health, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Trump has ordered a far-reaching pause on all federal loans and grants, putting multiple organizations in jeopardy and causing widespread confusion throughout the federal government.

Office of Management and Budget Director Matthew J. Vaeth issued a two-page memo Monday stating that federal agencies need to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” and any other programs that included “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.” The funding pause starts on Tuesday and will go through February. The rest of the details are unclear. 

“The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” Vaeth continued in his memo.

But the Green New Deal was never an actual law, and how much federal funding is actually going toward “transgenderism”? The budget freeze is apparently making exceptions for people receiving “personal assistance,” but who falls under that umbrella is also up in the air. Will farmers and small-business owners be shut out of federal funding now too?  

Perhaps most troubling, the order seems to violate the impoundment law, which prevents presidents from withholding funding already approved by Congress. 

“This order is a potential five-alarm fire for nonprofit organizations and the people and communities they serve,” said Diane Yentel, the chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits.

“From pausing research on cures for childhood cancer to halting food assistance, safety from domestic violence, and closing suicide hotlines, the impact of even a short pause in funding could be devastating and cost lives,” she continued. “This order could decimate thousands of organizations and leave neighbors without the services they need.”

Donald Trump’s Justice Department has already fired more than a dozen employees who were involved in the forty-seventh president’s criminal prosecution.

The mass firing targeted career prosecutors who had worked directly with former special counsel Jack Smith as he developed two cases against Trump: one on the forty-fifth president’s alleged retention of classified documents after he left the White House, and another on Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots. Smith’s team had at least 40 attorneys investigating Trump after the end of his first term.

The matter boiled down to “trust” for the incoming administration, which claimed that the prosecutors had weaponized the government against the MAGA leader and had no place in a second Trump term.

“In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda. This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government,” a spokesman told The Washington Post in a statement Monday.

The highly unusual firings are effective immediately, according to the Associated Press, which noted that rank-and-file prosecutors are rarely terminated by incoming administrations for their involvement in sensitive investigations.

Smith concluded his investigations shortly after Trump won the November election, citing statutes that prevent criminal investigations of a sitting president. He resigned from the Justice Department earlier this month, and the first volume of his final report—which focused on the details of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election—was released the following week under the direction of former Attorney General Merrick Garland. One line from the report plainly stated that Smith had obtained enough evidence to convict Trump had he not been reelected to the Oval Office.

The firing of Smith’s team follows a major reshuffling of key officials at the Justice Department, which last week conducted a leadership shakeup by reassigning as many as 20 senior officials to different departments.