The “organized” Trump White House lasted one week
With Trump, chaos is never very far.
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, January 29, 2025. President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress is 34 days away. The 2025 elections are 279 days away. The 2026 elections are 643 days away.
Yesterday was the first day that it really felt like Donald Trump was back in the White House.
Sure, the previous week had included plenty of the features that marked Trump’s first term: audacious policy moves, hyperbolic claims, ubiquitous media appearances. But it was also different. It was, as the Associated Press and other outlets wrote, strikingly organized.
A group that had once been called (by one of Trump’s top aides) a “Team of Vipers” appeared to have been tamed by the “Ice Maiden,” chief of staff Susie Wiles, as the White House efficiently cranked out a slew of carefully crafted executive orders.
Several of the directives were controversial, like pardoning January 6th rioters. Others were quickly hit with legal challenges, like ending birthright citizenship. But that was intentional: Trump’s advisers had been given four years to plan for their return; even orders of dubious constitutionality were drafted as test cases, to see how they would fare in court. It was a far cry from Trump’s first week in 2017, when his much more chaotic transition team yielded the shoddily written “Muslim ban.”
But then: Week Two.
The familiar swirl of chaos — the real thing, not the organized, well-plotted-out kind — returned to Trump’s Washington on Monday night, when the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memo announcing that all federal loans and grants would be paused until they could be reviewed to weed out “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering policies.”
Confusion reigned. Federal employees, state governments, and nonprofits rushed to figure out what the move meant. Clarifications were issued. Miscommunications ensued. And, throughout Tuesday, the news alerts came fast and furious, announcing new twists to a developing story — including, eventually, a federal judge freezing the funding freeze.
Now that’s what I remember Trump in the Oval Office feeling like.
While other Trump 2.0 executive orders were written with a smooth implementation in mind, the same cannot be said about the Monday memo by acting OMB Director Matthew Vaeth.
The memo called for a temporary pause of “all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance,” with two exceptions added in a pair of footnotes: Medicare and Social Security benefits would continue untouched, Vaeth said, and so would “assistance provided directly to individuals.”
Did that exception include Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income adults, which reaches individuals only through state governments? Or Pell Grants, the financial aid program for undergraduates, which usually goes through universities before reaching its recipients?
No one knew. Not even, apparently, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told a reporter, “I’ll check back on that and get back to you,” when they asked if Medicaid payments would be interrupted. It may seem strange to send the president’s top spokesperson to a nationally televised briefing without information on whether the White House was pausing a program used by 72 million Americans — but it was a hallmark of exactly the sort of messy rollout that was typical of Trump I.
Leavitt also said that programs affected by the freeze should reach out to incoming OMB Director Russell Vought (who has not even been confirmed yet) on a case-by-case basis to ask for a reversal, a recipe for further chaos.
Later Tuesday, as the confusion mounted nationwide, the OMB was forced to release another memo, which clarified that programs like Medicaid, Pell grants, and food stamps would continue, as would assistance for renters, farmers, and small businesses.
It certainly seems like at least someone in the government thought that Medicaid would be impacted, though, because state officials across the country reported that the online portals they use to receive federal Medicaid funding stopped working Tuesday. White House officials told CBS News that the portal outages were unrelated to the funding freeze, but that explanation appeared to contradict the error message on the portals. Wires seemed to have been crossed.
The follow-up memo offered little clarity. “Any program that provides direct benefits to Americans is explicitly excluded from the pause and exempted from this review process,” the second memo again said — before listing Medicaid and other exempt programs that largely aren’t structured as “direct benefits.”
When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tweeted that “funding for law enforcement is now in danger thanks to Donald Trump,” the White House responded, “No, it isn’t. Stop lying,” attaching a screenshot of the “direct benefits” language from the second memo. I suppose law enforcement grants are “direct” in a way — in that they go directly to someone (in this case, police departments), just like any grant does — but they certainly don’t end up directly in Americans’ pockets in the way a Social Security check does. It was not clear why that language was supposed to have made clear that law enforcement grants were safe.
Similarly, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) took to X to assure constituents that, according to officials he had spoken to, “services and resources provided through the Department of Veterans Affairs” (VA) would continue to be made available to veterans without interruption. But a spreadsheet, made public by Puck News, of the 2,625 individual grant programs that the OMB planned to review listed 43 under the VA’s auspices, including grants concerning suicide prevention efforts and legal services for veterans (both of which go through nonprofit organizations, not “directly” to the veterans).
As the day went on, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller eventually introduced a new standard while speaking to reporters: “This doesn’t affect any federal programs that Americans rely on,” he said. “Full stop.”
Miller did not explain how the White House would be deciding which programs Americans do or don’t “rely on.” The spreadsheet included everything from the National School Lunch Program to the State and Community Highway Safety Program, both of which are administered by state and local governments.
At the same time as questions were swirling about the OMB memo(s), the State Department was dealing with similar confusion. On his first day in office, Trump had signed an executive order pausing nearly all U.S. foreign aid programs until the same sort of review could take place.
The order sparked yet another governmentwide scramble, with humanitarian officials warning, according to CNN, that “if the suspension continued for two more weeks, thousands could die. And the freeze, if continued, could cause a huge number of organizations doing the work to close permanently, as they are not receiving the funding to keep their employees.”
Just as the OMB did, Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a clarifying memo Tuesday significantly shrinking the effect of the initial order. “Core life saving programs,” including those involving medicine, medical services, food, and shelter, would now be exempt from the freeze, Rubio said. No such exceptions were made in the original directive.
Many close observers speculated that Trump’s funding freeze was an attempt to challenge the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) of 1974, the federal law that prohibits presidents from unilaterally refusing to spend (also known as “impounding”) congressionally appropriated dollars. I have a more detailed explainer of impoundment, its history, and legality here.
That’s certainly possible — during the campaign, Trump promised to test impoundment in the courts — but it was also striking that neither of the OMB memos tried to argue that the ICA is unconstitutional or, really, offered much of a legal case at all why Trump was able to do what he was doing by going around Congress.
That leaves a few options of what was going on here:
Trump’s team was trying to test if they could impound funds, but didn’t realize the full extent of programs that would be impacted under the order and reversed themselves once they found out.
Trump’s team was trying to test if they could impound funds and planned to impact this many programs, but reversed themselves once they received backlash.
Trump’s team wasn’t trying to test if they could impound funds (and were just planning to freeze grants where Congress gave the president leeway to pick the recipients, as opposed to grant programs specifically mandated by Congress), but wrote the order incredibly poorly, so that the first memo made it seem like both types of spending were included.
In other words: Either his aides were unaware of the consequences of what it would mean to freeze all federal grant programs (which does seem to be the case with the foreign aid pause) or they were unable to predict the political backlash that would come with pausing those programs or they don’t know how to properly draft executive memoranda to communicate what they are trying to do.
Whichever explanation is correct, none of them speak highly of Trump’s supposedly more “organized” White House. At best, it means that Trump’s advisers (some of whom are battle-tested from his first go-around but others of whom are strikingly inexperienced imports from the tech world) are unfamiliar with the machinery of government, and unable to forecast the far-reaching implications (political and bureaucratic) of what it looks like, on a granular level, to pause trillions of dollars of spending.
Perhaps luckily for them, they have now been granted more time to figure out exactly what it is they’re trying to do here — and which programs will actually be impacted — after U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan temporarily blocked the funding freeze from going into effect.
The order from AliKhan, a Biden appointee, came precisely three minutes before the freeze was set to begin.
Even after the whiplash Tuesday, it is still clear that Trump (and Wiles) have assembled a more capable and unified team in the second term. There have been far fewer leaks, far fewer reports of clashing power centers. (Questions, and jealousies, around Elon Musk’s role remain a key exception.)
But the 24 hours of reversals and rushed clarifications we just lived through offer a reminder that this is still a Trump presidency, after all. And that means, no matter how orderly things may seem, chaos is rarely far behind.
More news to know
An important update: Yesterday’s newsletter focused on Trump’s inspector general (IG) firing spree and the shrug it received from a Congress, with a particular eye on the blasé response by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has long been a prominent defender of IGs.
Later in the day, Grassley — along with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) — penned a much sharper letter to Trump calling on the president to offer a rationale behind the firings, as required by law. Over on X, where the 91-year-old Grassley often posts in difficult-to-decipher shorthand, the Iowa Republican wrote:
IGs arent immune to removal & if theyre not doing their job properly they ought 2b dismissed However the law is the law Congress requires detailed notice for every IG dismissal Sen Durbin & I r asking Pres Trump for that explanation American ppl deserve qualified& nonpartisan IGs
The responses are full of conservatives telling Grassley he should fear a primary challenge in his next election (even though he will be 95, and presumably retiring, by then). Still, the responses show how much modern-day lawmakers have to fear by crossing party lines — which is why it’s important to note when they do so, especially considering I called out Grassley’s initial response in Tuesday’s newsletter. Maybe Grassley decided to act after reading Wake Up To Politics.
Speaking of: Trump’s funding freeze offered yet another test for congressional Republicans to show the sort of “institutional patriotism” I wrote about on Tuesday — standing up for their branch of government (and, in this case, its “power of the purse”) over their party.
Not many GOP lawmakers opted to do so. Perhaps the most galling response came from House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK), who told CNN: “Appropriations is not a law, it’s a directive of Congress.” Appropriations laws are, in fact, laws — why else would Cole, who has been on the Appropriations Committee since 2009, have spent the last 15 years writing and fighting over them otherwise?
According to Politico, the handful of House Republicans who criticized the funding freeze Tuesday later received “calls from Trump officials telling them to stop.” In other words: officials from the executive branch ordered members of the legislative branch to stop complaining about the executive infringing on the legislature’s powers. And, it seems, many of them listened.
More news for your awareness:
NBC: Trump signs sweeping order to further restrict trans care for minors nationwide
AP: Caroline Kennedy warns senators that cousin RFK Jr. is a ‘predator’
The day ahead
President Donald Trump will sign the Laken Riley Act, the first piece of legislation of his second term, in a 2 p.m. ceremony. The measure will require federal authorities to detain and potentially deport undocumented migrants who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.
Trump is also expected to sign executive orders seeking to revoke federal funding for schools that teach critical race theory, redirect federal funding to school choice programs, and instructing federal agencies to identify authorities available to combat antisemitism.
The Senate will vote to confirm Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator nominee Lee Zeldin and vote to advance Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face questions from the Senate Finance Committee at a 10 a.m. hearing.
The House is on recess as House Republicans meet for their retreat at the Trump National Doral resort in Florida.
The Supreme Court has no oral arguments scheduled.
I was pretty confident that "being organized" would soon fall by the wayside in Trump 2.0, even with Wiles at the helm. Appointing staff who know nothing about how the federal government works makes that inevitable.
There's lots of opportunity for a clear-eyed examination of what's not working at the federal level. Making sure tax-payer dollars are well spent is an important goal. But chaos is not a good change agent. And I'm afraid that once again we're looking at four years of confusion and waste instead of making concrete changes to benefit American citizens. Another huge step back for our country. We cannot afford this.
Isn't there a fourth option where Trump’s team was trying to test if they could impound funds and test which programs received the most support/backlash from cutting? It feels like a similar tactic to the tariff war - act as if you're cutting everything so that people will accept more concessions. I imagine they expected backlash, which helped to inform which programs they'll cut later.