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.

Buried within one of the dozens of executive orders that President Donald Trump issued in his first days in office is a section titled “Terminating the Green New Deal.” As presidential directives go, this one initially seemed like a joke. The Green New Deal exists mostly in the dreams of climate activists; it has never been fully enacted into law.

The next line of Trump’s order, however, made clear he is quite serious: “All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” The president is apparently using “the Green New Deal” as a shorthand for any federal spending on climate change. But the two laws he targets address much more than that: The $900 billion IRA not only funds clean-energy programs but also lowers prescription-drug prices, while the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law represents the biggest investment in roads, bridges, airports, and public transportation in decades. And the government has spent only a portion of each.

In one sentence, Trump appears to have cut off hundreds of billions of dollars in spending that Congress has already approved, torching Joe Biden’s two most significant legislative accomplishments. The order stunned even some Republicans, many of whom supported the infrastructure law and have taken credit for its investments.

And Trump didn’t stop there. Yesterday, the White House ordered a pause on all federal grants and loans—a move that could put on hold an additional tens of billions of dollars already approved by Congress, touching many corners of American life. Democrats and government watchdogs see the directives as an opening salvo in a fight over the separation of powers, launched by a president bent on defying Congress’s will. “It’s an illegal executive order, and it’s stealing,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told me, referring to the order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law.

Withholding money approved by Congress “undermines the entire architecture of the Constitution,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told me. “It essentially makes the president into a king.” Last night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans “blatantly disobeys the law.”

The Constitution gives Congress the so-called power of the purse—that is, the House and the Senate decide how much money the government spends and where it goes. Since 1974, a federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act has prohibited the executive branch from spending less than the amount of money that Congress appropriates for a given program or purpose. During Trump’s first term, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated that law by holding up aid to Ukraine—a move that became central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

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

Trump has argued that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, and so has his nominee for budget director, Russell Vought, who had the same job at the end of the president’s first term. Vought also helped write Project 2025, the conservative-governing blueprint that attracted so many attacks from Democrats that Trump disavowed it during the campaign.

In his Senate confirmation hearings this month, Vought repeatedly refused to commit to abiding by the impoundment act even as he acknowledged that it is “the law of the land.” “For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation if they could do it for less,” he told senators at his first hearing. During his second appearance, when Van Hollen asked him whether he would comply with the law, Vought did not answer directly. “Senator, the president ran against the Impoundment Control Act,” he replied. His defiance astonished Democrats. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” Van Hollen told me.

The pause on funds for the Biden-signed laws did not draw as much attention as other moves Trump made on his first day back in the White House, especially his blanket pardons for January 6 defendants. Nor was it the only one that appeared to test the limits of his authority. A separate executive order froze nearly all foreign aid for 90 days, while others targeted birthright citizenship and civil-service protections for federal employees.

But the order cutting off spending for the IRA and the infrastructure law could have far-reaching implications. State and municipal governments in both Democratic and Republican jurisdictions worry that they may not be able to use investments and grants that the federal government promised them. “It’s creating chaos,” DeLauro said. “I honestly don’t think the people who are dealing with this know what they are doing.” She listed a range of popular and economically significant programs that appear to be on pause, including assistance for home-energy bills and money to replace lead pipes that contaminate drinking water.

“It was alarming,” Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska told me. Bacon, a Republican who narrowly won reelection in a district Trump lost, called the White House after reading the text of last week’s executive order to seek assurance that money he’d secured for Nebraska—including $73 million to upgrade Omaha’s airport—wouldn’t be stopped.

The immediate confusion became so intense that a day after Trump signed the order, the White House issued a memo seeking to clarify its scope that seemed to slightly narrow its impact and open the door for some spending to continue. Bacon told me that he was assured the directive applied mostly to Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate, which Trump railed against on the campaign trail and is part of the IRA. DeLauro, however, said the memo offered little clarity: “Everything is at risk.”

Yesterday’s memo extending the funding pause to all federal grant and loan programs set off another frenzy. The directive sought to exempt Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as other direct aid to individuals. But according to a copy of the memo published by The Washington Post, it explicitly targets “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Whether the funding pause constitutes an illegal impoundment is unclear. The executive branch does have some latitude in how it spends money. And yesterday’s memo instructs federal agencies to halt funding only “to the extent permissible under applicable law.” Describing last week’s order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law, Vought told senators that it was merely a “programmatic delay,” a term that arguably falls within what federal departments are allowed to do.

More broadly, executive orders are frequently less consequential than they appear, Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan and occasional Atlantic contributor, told me about last week’s directive. “It’s one thing to try to get a really nice headline for cutting back on government spending. It’s another thing altogether to decline to spend money that people are expecting you to spend,” Bagley said. “I would not be surprised if rhetoric does not match reality.”

To Charlie Ellsworth, a senior adviser with the nonprofit watchdog Congressional Integrity Project, Trump’s executive order on clean energy unmistakably oversteps the law. “They could have done this legally, but they didn’t,” Ellsworth, a former Schumer aide, told me. A new administration, for example, could have justified a pause in spending to ensure that a program was being funded in accordance with the law. But the order instead instructs agencies to ensure that the spending aligns with new policies set by the Trump administration. Ellsworth said that the order is “self-evidently” illegal.

The fight is almost certain to wind up in the courts, which have repeatedly ruled against the president’s ability to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. Indeed, Vought’s Senate testimony seemed to invite a legal challenge that could lead the Supreme Court, now with a 6–3 conservative majority and three Trump-appointed justices, to reconsider the question. “That seems to be their game plan,” Ellsworth said. “They want to get sued. They want to go to the Supreme Court.”

Van Hollen told me that he believes the Court would rule against Trump but that preferably the dispute won’t get that far. “You would hope that Republicans in Congress recognize they have an institutional interest in protecting Article I [of the Constitution] and the power of the purse, which is clearly congressional,” Van Hollen said.

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Beyond the question of legality, Van Hollen warned that Trump’s orders would jeopardize virtually all negotiations over spending on Capitol Hill, because Democrats would not be able to trust the administration to keep its end of any agreement. Although Republicans have majorities in both the House and the Senate, they will need to strike deals with Democrats to avert government shutdowns and a catastrophic default on U.S. debt.

There were early signs of GOP pushback on last week’s spending freeze, but it fell well short of a revolt. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the chair of the Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee, said at one of Vought’s hearings that he disagreed with the administration’s view on spending and impoundments. “I think if we appropriate something for a cause, that’s where it’s supposed to go, and that will still be my position,” Paul said. And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chair of the Budget Committee, said at a second Vought hearing that he, too, had “concerns” about impoundment. But neither of them planned to stand in the way of the nominee who has argued for the president to wrest control of spending from Congress. “When you win, you get to pick people,” Graham told Vought. “And I’m glad he picked you.”

On the Republican side, the fight might be left to lawmakers such as Bacon, who has some protection from presidential retribution because he represents a purple district where voters might reward him for standing up to Trump. The GOP, he said, should go after policies it opposes through legislation, not executive order. “You just can’t determine what laws you want to execute and what you don’t,” Bacon said of Trump. Executive orders, he added, “have gotten out of hand” from presidents in both parties. “You can’t change the law,” Bacon said. “I think Republicans should stay true to that notion.”

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.