The Incompetent Liars

The first big attack on federal government assistance blew up in the White House’s face bigly.

From YouTube

There are two things we already knew would define the second Trump administration: a stunning level of incompetence, and a brazen willingness to flat out lie to the public, especially when they need to cover up their incompetence.

Incompetent people in charge of trillions of dollars is terrifying on its own. And the last two days proved how badly they can damage our country and how far the White House will go to gaslight us about it. They’ve also proven how well resistance to this insanity works.

On Monday, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo stating that it was freezing “all Federal financial assistance.” It made an exception only for direct assistance to individuals and noted the freeze would not include Medicare or Social Security.

But that left a lot still frozen, including billions in Medicaid grants, Head Start funds and SNAP benefits.

Chaos quickly ensued. Congressional offices were flooded with calls from constituents, nonprofits, emergency workers and students. The “rollout” of the freeze went so poorly that the White House went into damage control on Tuesday, then people like Trump advisor Stephen Miller and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt worked furiously to rewrite the story of what just happened and lie brazenly to the public.

I don’t think we should let that slide, so this is what actually went down. In the end, the public pressure grew too great, and the OMB wound up completely rescinding its original memo.

I love this for them.

“All” means all

The two-page memo put out by OMB on Monday was sweeping and designed to shock. It spoke of saving trillions of dollars by cutting federal grants, railed against “Marxist” and “woke” programs, and claimed in black and white that the pause on disbursements would apply to all Federal financial assistance:

In case there was any doubt, the memo dropped a footnote explaining that Federal financial assistance meant “(a)ssistance that recipients or subrecipients receive or administer,” except where the assistance was “provided directly to individuals.” To make their intent even clearer, Footnote 2 declared that the freeze would not impact two very specific programs, Medicare and Social Security.

Then they drove the point home that programs like Medicaid were on the chopping block. On Tuesday, the portal for payments from that program, known as Payment Management Services, went down in all 50 states, per a report from the office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and as confirmed by the New York Times.

In place of the regular access to funds was a prominent red banner warning that there would be delays due to “executive orders” on disallowed grants.

In sum, a clearer message could hardly have been imagined: The Monday night massacre of a OMB memo had declared that “all” financial assistance was now frozen; Medicaid and other key programs like SNAP and Head Start were not listed among the programs excepted from the freeze; and by no coincidence the whole payment portal went down with a big red message saying payment delays would result from “Executive Orders regarding potentially unallowable grant payments.”

Howls of protest

The reaction to the memo was swift and the outcry nationwide.

Tens of millions of low income Americans worried they would be suddenly cut off from Medicaid and food stamps and began calling government offices. Students relying on Pell grants and scholarships now wondered whether they could continue attending school. Seniors across the country didn’t know if they would receive food from Meals on Wheels. And parents relying on Head Start for their kids didn’t even know if they could be dropped off as normal on Tuesday.

And those are just a few examples.

Trump voters also began posting videos lamenting the loss of their SNAP benefits. And GOP leaders sought to reassure their constituents.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), for example, posted that “Alaskans have understandably been reaching out to my office all day, asking for clarity, about what OMB’s memo ordering a pause in grants, loans and other financial assistance means for them.” She noted, “At this point, we don’t have any more direction than what has been reported.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) admitted that he had to reach out to the White House to find out what was impacted. He assured Virginians that the pause would not impact individual assistance or other key programs. But he couldn’t help himself. He labeled Democratic outrage over the apparent loss of Medicare, Head Start and other funds as a “partisan stunt to disseminate knowingly misleading information” and said such actions were “dangerous fearmongering and completely wrong.”

Never mind that Youngkin had to call the White House himself to obtain guidance (apparently they will pick up for a Republican governor). And never mind that it was OMB’s own Monday memo— and the by-no-small-coincidence mass portal outages for Medicaid and Head Start—that drove much of the chaos.

In Louisiana, Republican Governor Jeff Landry, considered a close ally of Trump, urged the government to provide more time and clarity. “We urge O.M.B. to develop a responsible runway to untangle us from any unnecessary and egregious policies without jeopardizing the financial stability of the state,” he said in a statement.

Sorry, our bad. “All” does not mean all.

On Tuesday, after the first memo met with incredibly fierce pushback from across the nation, OMB released a second memo seeking to clarify the scope of the first. Right out the gate, it contradicted the express words of its own memo from the day before.

“Q: Is this a freeze on all Federal financial assistance?” the second memo asked in an FAQ format.

“A: No, the pause does not apply across the board,” was the new answer.

Funny, because OMB had just said it was pausing “all” Federal financial assistance that wasn’t direct assistance. And now it says the pause doesn’t apply across the board? Which is it?

The second memo also sought to reassure the country that frozen funds would not include things like Medicaid, student loans and scholarships, or food assistance. That was particularly hard to square because those very programs were listed among 2,600 that the OMB had said in a separate release were under direct review.

The New York Times got a hold of that list and published it here. And to no one’s surprise, Medicaid, Pell grants and SNAP benefits appear among the targeted programs.

So is the country to believe a second clarification memo, or should we go with memo No. 1 along with the spreadsheet of 2,600 programs OMB released?

It seems clear that no one is really in charge, and that the target is a moving one. To underscore this absurd and dangerous situation, the gaslighting from the White House began.

“Clear as day”

Trump advisor Stephen Miller insisted in an interview on CNN that the first memo had been “clear as day.”

“We just talked to Congressman Don Bacon, a Republican, a Trump supporter. We just interviewed him. He said there’s a lot of confusion—” CNN’s Jake Tapper began.

“Yeah, created by the media, Jake!” Miller interrupted. “The OMB guidance memo, if you read it, is as clear as day.”

“It’s pretty broad, and confusingly written,” Tapper responded.

Tapper was only half correct. The scope of the memo is broad, but there is little confusion about what the memo says. It is only confusing in retrospect, now that the White House has furiously walked back the scope of it in a second memo and attempted to rewrite the literal words “all Federal assistance programs.”

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also proved she is up to the task of lying and deflecting as she faced a barrage of questions online and later during a press conference.

With respect to the Medicaid portal being inaccessible, Leavitt described it as an “outage” despite the clear red banner that indicated the inaccessibility of the portal was intentional. She also falsely stated that payments were still being processed and sent, even though no recipient could log on, and acted as if this were a technical glitch that needed to be resolved so that it would “back online shortly”—rather than a deliberate bar in line with the Executive Order, which is what the banner plainly indicated.

Did the banner appear out of nowhere?

Second, Leavitt did not know, and said she would have to confirm, whether Medicaid was or was not fully excluded from the freeze. Specifically, Leavitt was asked directly during her press conference on Tuesday whether she could guarantee that no individual currently on Medicaid would see a cut off as a result of the pause.

“I’ll check back on that and get back to you,” she responded.

Leavitt also tried to bolster the outrageous breadth and draconian nature of the freeze by issuing flat out lies, such as the false claim that $50 million had been sent to Gaza for condoms. As The Guardian reported, that claim “is almost certainly not true.”

“According to a comprehensive report issued in September by the US Agency for International Development (USAid), not a penny of the $60.8m in contraceptive and condom shipments funded by the US in the past year went to Gaza,” wrote the paper. “In fact, the accounting shows, there were no condoms sent to any part of the Middle East, and just one small shipment, $45,680 in oral and injectable contraceptives, was sent to the region, all of it distributed to the government of Jordan.”

With Miller and Leavitt lying and deflecting nonstop, it’s impossible to know what the government’s actual policy is. The White House is backpedaling furiously, especially now that a federal judge has granted a Temporary Restraining Order until next Monday’s hearing on the rule and its freeze.

But one thing is clear: Public pressure made a significant difference, forcing the administration to back off of its most extreme positions and then lie shamelessly to cover up its own overreach.

This has exposed something important to remember: The people who are in charge still don’t know what they’re doing, and in an effort to please their higher ups, they are shitting the bed and forcing an embarrassing clean-up of the mess. The key to forcing any retreat is to make Republican officials recognize the catastrophe and start calling the White House for clarity and explanations.

With benefits such as SNAP, Medicaid and later the ACA on the line—programs heavily used by Trump supporting Republicans—Democratic messaging can be honed to a sharper point going forward. “Keep your government hands off my benefits” may be an ironic message and battlecry, but it’s one that’s working.

In fact, this time it worked so well that on Wednesday, the OMB issued a terse rescission of the entire first memo.

Again, I love this for them.