President Donald Trump intended his flood of executive orders to shock and awe his opponents. But on Monday night, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget instead shocked the Trump White House.

That memo, with its call for a “temporary pause” to all federal-government grants and loans, set off widespread panic and confusion within the federal government and among the millions of individuals and institutions reliant on federal funds. But it was released without going through the usual White House approval processes.

The memo was produced by the budget office alone, which failed to get proper sign-off from the White House, according to a senior White House official and a second person familiar with the memo. The team headed by Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, had requested to see the memo before it went out, but OMB never sent it over, these people said.

As a result, the White House was caught off guard as the memo sparked the sort of chaos that Trump’s team had hoped would be a vestige of his first term. Within 48 hours, OMB was forced to rescind the memo.

After the memo was initially released, White House staffers—knowing they faced a communications problem, if not also a policy one—prepared White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to handle questions on the funding freeze at her inaugural briefing yesterday.

As anticipated, reporters peppered her with questions about which federal programs might be affected by the freeze. “I have now been asked and answered this question four times,” a slightly exasperated Leavitt said. “To individuals at home who receive direct assistance from the federal government: You will not be impacted by this federal freeze.”

In response to the confusion, OMB sent out a clarification memo yesterday, insisting that the pause did “not apply across-the-board” and was intended to affect programs from the Biden administration that were not in sync with Trump’s day-one executive orders, such as DEI initiatives and “the green new deal”—which Republicans use as a catchall term for climate programs.

But if the OMB memo was not properly vetted, it should not have come as a complete surprise. A slide deck labeled “Office of Management and Budget” that outlines priorities and goals in line with Trump’s agenda—marked “confidential,” bearing the seal of the executive office of the president, and dated January 2025—has been circulating on Capitol Hill. The presentation, focused on what it calls “regulatory misalignment,” presents columns of problems paired with actions intended to address them.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974, for instance, is listed as a problem because it undermines the president’s ability “to ensure fiscal responsibility.” The suggested action is restoring “impoundment authority” by challenging the act’s constitutionality in court. Both Trump and Russell Vought, his nominee to lead the budget office, have argued that the Watergate-era law—which generally prevents the executive branch from spending less than what Congress has appropriated for various programs and purposes—is unconstitutional.

Another problem, according to the presentation, is that “existing legal interpretations protect entrenched bureaucratic practices.” To solve that, it calls for the appointment of “a bold General Counsel at OMB with a mandate to challenge outdated legal precedents that protect the status quo.”

An OMB spokesperson, Rachel Cauley, told me that, despite outlining in detail many steps that Trump actually took once in office, the slide deck was not the work of Trump’s incoming team. “Trump officials have never seen this document before and it’s pretty apparent it was generated before Trump was in office,” Cauley wrote to me in a text message.

But whatever its origin, the slide deck seems to have been oddly prophetic. The source familiar with the OMB memo that touched off so much controversy this week said that it had been drafted by Mark Paoletta, who was appointed by Trump as the agency’s general counsel. OMB declined to comment on that claim.

Even after OMB rescinded its Monday memo, confusion reigned. This afternoon, Leavitt tried to clarify things with a post on X: “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” she wrote. “It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.”

Her post did little to resolve the lingering questions surrounding federal funds, but made it perfectly clear how the White House now feels about the memo.

The great federal-grant freeze of 2025 is over, but don’t expect it to be gone for good.

The Office of Management and Budget, which issued a memo freezing grants on Monday, has revoked it, The Washington Post first reported. The whole thing went so fast that many people may have never had a chance to sort out what was happening. Yesterday, amid widespread confusion about what the order did or didn’t do, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was unable to answer specific questions about it. State and local officials of both parties were bewildered, and yesterday afternoon, a federal judge blocked the order. Today, OMB folded—at least for now. The White House says that it has withdrawn the grant freeze in the memo, but not the executive orders mentioned in it, some of which assert a freeze on spending. Part of the goal appears to be to short-circuit court proceedings that might produce an unfavorable ruling.

This episode resembles the incompetent fumbling of the first Trump administration, especially its earliest days. But this was no fluke and no ad hoc move. It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch, and this week’s drama is better understood as a battle over priorities within the Republican Party than as unmanaged chaos.

The abortive grant freeze is an example of the second Trump administration’s strategy to drastically deploy executive power as part of a bigger, and somewhat paradoxical, gambit to shrink the federal government as a whole. “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” the current OMB head, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration convened by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank. The strategy is to seize power and dare both Congress and the courts to stop it. This tactic is unpredictable, as this week’s misadventures show, but it’s also relatively low-risk. The ideologues inside the administration want to see what they can get away with, and if it doesn’t work, so be it.

[Read: ‘It’s an illegal executive order. And it’s stealing.’]

But the administration has other staffers who are more responsive to politics. President Donald Trump, for example, has relatively weak ideological commitments. The court injunction yesterday was a nuisance, but what really seems to have done in the freeze was the backlash—not so much from the public, but from state and local officials, including many Republicans, who were outraged about the withdrawal of funds and lack of communication. The political team won this round over the ideologues, but there will be more.

At a mechanical level, the fight over the freeze was a battle over impoundment, the power of the executive branch to not spend money appropriated by Congress. Federal law on this is as settled as any: A law passed in 1974 prevents impoundment, except in cases where the president seeks permission from Congress. But Trump and some of his aides argue that that law is unconstitutional.

In a letter to Congress in the last days of the first Trump administration, Vought (then the head of OMB) wrote that the law “is unworkable in practice and should be significantly reformed or repealed.” In September, the attorney Mark Paoletta co-wrote a report for Vought’s nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, arguing that the power of impoundment was constitutional; Trump has now appointed Paoletta the general counsel of OMB, a position he also held in Trump’s first administration. And as my colleague Russell Berman reported yesterday, Vought refused to commit to abiding by the Impoundment Control Act during his confirmation hearings. And Vought and his allies had a plan for how to knock it down.

“President Trump will take action to challenge the constitutionality of limits placed on the Impoundment Power,” the Trump presidential campaign said—in other words, he planned to disobey the law, litigate any challenges, and hope to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court. It’s worked in the past.

This all goes to show that sometimes the chaos has a strategy behind it. Things just didn’t shake out the way Vought’s crew had hoped this time.

One curiosity is why the administration wouldn’t just try to go through Congress to rescind funding passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. After all, Republicans now control both the House and Senate. The White House might have a few reasons for wanting to do it on its own. First, legislation is slow, and Trump prefers to show results fast. Second, Republican margins are narrow, and although GOP elected officials and voters favor cuts in the abstract, they don’t always favor cuts to particular things that voters like, so the White House might struggle to get even the requisite simple majority to rescind some of the spending it tried to freeze this week. Third, impoundment per se is not the only goal—it’s also a means to the ideological end of seizing power for the executive branch.

In Project 2025, Vought laments that Congress has yielded too much power to the presidency. “The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people. This challenge is created and exacerbated by factors like Congress’s decades-long tendency to delegate its lawmaking power to agency bureaucracies,” he wrote. Paradoxically, his plan for limiting the executive branch is to give it more muscle.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

As if to prove Vought’s point about congressional deference, Speaker Mike Johnson has backed the White House thus far. Just a decade ago, conservatives were furious that then-President Barack Obama was using executive orders to do things that congressional Democrats had failed or declined to do. Now the use of much more radical executive orders is the first recourse of the Republican president.

Because this effort is core to the ideological agenda of Project 2025 principals such as Vought, the revocation of this executive order likely won’t be the last effort we see along these lines. And having to back down for political reasons tends to make the internal battles only fiercer. Trump’s attempts to decimate the civil service and clear out career bureaucrats are well known, but Project 2025’s authors reserved special animus for those whom they expected to be on their side during the first Trump administration.

“I had a front-row seat on many of these issues and importantly [saw] how bad thinking would end up preventing what we were trying to accomplish, from less-than-vigorous political appointees who refused to occupy the moral high ground, particularly in the first two years of the president's administration,” Vought said in a 2023 speech. He has no intention of letting that happen again.

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

Related:

Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message. Why 2025 is different from 2017

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s second term might have already peaked. The attack on birthright citizenship is a big test for the Constitution. You’re being alienated from your own attention, Chris Hayes writes.

Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.

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Early this morning, the Department of Justice released the report of Special Counsel Jack Smith on his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election—closing the saga of the U.S. criminal-justice system’s effort to hold the coup instigator accountable. No prosecution will now take place. Compared with the present outcome, it would have been better if President Joe Biden had pardoned Trump for the January 6 coup attempt.

A pardon would at least have upheld the theory that violent election overthrows are wrong and illegal. A pardon would have said: The U.S. government can hold violent actors to account. It just chooses not to do so in this case.

Instead, the special counsel’s report delivers a confession of the helplessness of the U.S. government. Smith asserts that the evidence was sufficient to convict Trump of serious crimes—and then declares the constitutional system powerless to act: The criminal is now the president-elect, therefore his crime cannot be punished.

The report suggests that if the law had moved faster, then Trump today would be a convict, not a president. But the law did not move fast. Why not? Whose fault was that? Fingers will point, but the finger-pointing does not matter. What matters is the outcome and the message.

Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in January 2017. He violated that oath in January 2021. Now, in January 2025, he will swear it again. The ritual survives. Its meaning has been lost.

In 2022, a prominent conservative intellectual proclaimed that the United States had entered a “post-constitutional moment”:

Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement—a new regime if you will—that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.

That conservative was Russell Vought, one of the co-authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy plan, and now President-Elect Trump’s choice to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, which controls and coordinates all actions by the executive branch. The post-constitutional moment that Trump supporters once condemned has now become their opportunity. They have transgressed the most fundamental taboo of a constitutional regime, the prohibition against political violence, and instead of suffering consequences, they have survived, profited, and returned to power.

If anything, the transgression has made them more powerful than they otherwise would have been. Bob Woodward gives an account in his 2018 book, Fear, that Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief White House economic adviser, thwarted his intent to withdraw from NAFTA and the U.S.–South Korea trade agreement by snatching the notification letters off the president’s desk. The story suggests something important about the difficulty Trump had imposing his will during his first term. But for his upcoming second term, Trump has made defending his actions in 2021 a test of loyalty. In December, The New York Times interviewed people involved in recruiting for senior roles in the Trump Defense Department or intelligence agencies; several of them had been quizzed about whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election and whether Trump did anything wrong in his challenge to the election on January 6. The clear implication was that to answer anything but No and No would have been disqualifying. There will be no more Gary Cohns, only J. D. Vances who will deny the last election and defend Trump’s actions to overturn it.

That is what a post-constitutional moment looks like.

Before Trump, American law was quite hazy on the legal immunity of the president. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be sued for his official acts. In 1997, the Court ruled that a president could be sued for personal acts unrelated to his office. Both of these rulings applied only to civil cases, not to criminal ones.

For nearly 250 years after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the question of the president’s rights under criminal law did not arise. Trump’s proclivity for wrongdoing forced the question on the country: Was a president of the United States subject to criminal law or not? Last year, the Supreme Court delivered a complex mess of an answer, whose main holding seemed to be: Here’s a complex, multipart, and highly subjective set of questions to answer first. Please relitigate each and every one of them, while we wait to see whether Trump wins or loses the 2024 election.

Now comes the Smith report with its simpler answer: If a president wins reelection, he has immunity for even the worst possible crimes committed during his first term in office.

The incentives contained in this outcome are clear, if perverse. And they are deeply sinister to the future of democracy in the United States.