About that funding freeze – It's stupid, careless, and cruel

Let's be clear, I do not like Donald Trump, and I certainly did not vote for him. Yet not too long ago I posted, The Vibes They Are a-Shiftin', in which I said:

Still, on the whole, the vibes are somehow good.

Does that mean that at long last the techtonic plates are beginning to shift? I sure hope so. And if they're shifting, it remains to be seen just who'll be guiding them into a new configuration. That is not at all written in stone.

I'm beginning to regret that. I'd forgotten that, whatever else he is, Trump is also cruel. Is that what his followers voted for?

Who the hell knows what the
next week will bring.

Robert Gordon over at Eating Policy has some cogent remarks under the title, Vast Carelessness:

I have spent years railing against long government memos with languorous timelines. How about a two-pager? Where’s the urgency?

Careful what you wish for. OMB’s two-pager on grants, with its 24-hour deadline, dropped like a bomb on a trillion-dollar grantmaking enterprise (and that’s just at HHS). It risks wreckage across the country.

The memo required agencies to pause all spending, with a footnote exempting “assistance received directly by individuals.” HHS suspended states from drawing down Medicaid funds and tribal facilities from drawing down Indian Health Service Funds. Also suspended were grants that provide funds for Head Start, child care, LIHEAP, and more. By midday yesterday, OMB issued a corrective note explaining that the footnote excluded Medicaid and Head Start, as well as other programs like SNAP and Pell grants. That was good, if incoherent, since Medicaid makes payments through intermediaries (states, which may in turn pay managed care organizations which pay providers) as much as any federal program. And the order leaves in the crosshairs, just at HHS, programs offering drug treatment and mental health services, funding foster care, serving the homeless, engaging in medical research, and on and on.

Smart lawyers have focused on the question whether the delay violates the Impoundment Control Act (sure seems to), but there’s another problem. The actions now unfolding may well violate the terms of any number of grant agreements. Grant agreements bind two parties—not only the grantee, but also the government. Here’s a snippet from the key text, the Uniform Grants Guidance:

Payments for allowable costs must not be withheld at any time during the period of performance unless required by Federal statute, regulations, or in one of the following instances: (i) The recipient or subrecipient has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the Federal award; or (ii) The recipient or subrecipient is delinquent in a debt….

[...]

Many of us desperately want to simplify the government’s rules and procedures, but that does not mean we want no rules at all. When a state or grantee receives a grant from the federal government, the receipt of the grant does not turn that state or grantee into a vassal or a subject who can only appeal for the king’s mercy. [...]

What is remarkable is how easily the Administration could have pursued the same ideological goals in a more orderly way.

There's more at the link.