No. of Recommendations: 18
In other words, the dems are lying. You can tell because they're speakingExcept that's
not the full memo. That's an OMB FAQ that they issued after the chaos started - when they tried to clean up the mess that they
absolutely caused. At the bottom of this post is a link to the actual memo that originally was issued by OMB.
The relevant language is here:
To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, 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. Note the language - agencies must temporarily pause
all activities related to obligation or disbursement of
all Federal financial assistance - a term defined earlier in the memo by reference to a CFR definition. The memo specifically says it doesn't apply to Social Security or Medicare (which are disbursed directly to individuals), but does
not say that Medi
caid (which is disbursed to state governments) is outside of its purview. Which is why Trump's Press Secretary couldn't confirm that.
Also note that as written in the memo, the pause applies to
all Federal financial assistance - not just the programs impacted by EO's. That's what the "including but not limited to" language means. Every piece of Federal financial assistance was supposed to be paused. That's because the ostensible purpose of the pause is to give the Administration time to review
for itself whether the spending is consistent with the EO's.
The memo did
not explicitly exclude anything other than Medicare, Social Security, and the programs that don't meet the CFR definition of Federal financial assistance. Every other piece of Federal financial assistance was very arguably covered by the initial memo, whether it conflicted with the EO's or not.
Once the sh!tstorm started, OMG tried to cover their butts by issuing the document that your Xitter correspondent provided. The
second OMB memo now claims that the pause only affects the programs within the ambit of the specific EO's. But that is absolutely
not what the original OMB memo said.
Because, again, Trump is acting either: i) heedlessly (if you want to be critical) or ii) like a tech founder to "move fast and break things" (if you want to phrase it a little more positively). There are arguments that support moving fast and breaking things, of course - but you can't tell people that they're lying when they notice that you've broken things while moving fast.
The initial memo was written so broadly that it
did cover every Federal financial assistance program - which caused a lot of uncertainty for a lot of people. It's nice that OMB tried to clean it up, but that doesn't mean the uncertainty caused by the first memo didn't happen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/deb7af80-...
