Trump still wants a spending fight with Congress, even after memo debacle
While the Trump administration intends to ax funding for initiatives it views as out of step with its priorities, it didn’t mean to blow up funding for a broader suite of programs.

The Trump administration has been waging a legal battle over its power to ignore congressional spending laws since the president’s last term. But plunging Washington into chaos over a poorly written memo wasn’t part of the plan.
While the Trump administration intends to eliminate funding for initiatives it considers not its priorities — such as foreign aid, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and environmental spending — it has not intended to blow up funding for a broader range of programs as it did when the White House budget office issued a memo Monday saying all federal financial aid programs were being halted, according to two senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity about private conversations.
The memo appears to be a broad and brazen attempt to challenge Congress’s spending authority under a theory stemming from Trump’s appointment of White House budget director Russell Vought, that the executive branch is not obligated to spend dollars that don’t fit its purposes.
And it was — the White House didn’t intend for it to be this comprehensive.
The Office of Management and Budget memo has roiled Trump’s inner circle, who complained Wednesday that it had not gone through proper channels and had not been vetted. Its broad language has created a political and legal problem — sparking anger and concern even among some Republican lawmakers who feared their constituents would be harmed and putting the administration in a thorny legal position that has already seen one judge block the spending freeze and another judge poised to do the same.
“It was poorly written by policymakers, not by communications people. So people took the first line and ran with it, which was ‘freeze federal funding,’” a senior administration official said, arguing that the memo should have been narrower in scope.
The confusion has left conservatives who have long criticized safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program trying to explain away the dollars that were left untouched.
The administration has since tried to correct the situation by rescinding its initial memo in an effort to ease some of the immediate panic and confusion.
But even without that, the president’s aggressively crafted executive orders that preceded the memo have created their own disruption — leaving billions of dollars in federal spending on hold as agencies weigh whether to comply with orders to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental plans and other Democratic priorities, including many approved by Congress.
Clarity will come only once the courts weigh in. While legal experts say the administration’s argument won’t hold up, Vogt and others appear eager to take the case to court, perhaps hoping the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will rule in their favor.
Legal battles over the executive branch’s power to withhold spending are already underway, particularly after White House press secretary Carolyn Levatt made clear that only the memo — not the freeze on federal funding for those programs itself — had been rescinded.
For example, federal funding remains on hold for environmental initiatives passed by previous administrations, including the $7 billion Solar for All program under the Inflation Reduction Act and the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, which was identified in Trump’s executive order as an example of spending that Trump wanted to stop.
James Capretta, who was deputy director of the White House budget office under former President George W. Bush, said the Trump administration’s “very broad view” of what federal spending the executive branch can cancel or delay, procedures known as sequestration, has mixed in with confusion over the memo.
“I think their intent was to do something very broad: to stop new spending so that new people coming in would have a chance to look at what’s going on,” said Capreta, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “They wrote it very broadly, covering all sorts of things that are governed by laws that they would have to change first if they wanted to change how the money was spent.”
“The foreclosure issue is still there, but I think it will be tested later, when they’re ready,” Caprita added.
The Trump White House has made no apologies for freezing congressional dollars that don’t fit its agenda — a blockade that includes everything from infrastructure payments to diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. The administration remains angry at media reports that are stoking fears of deeper cuts, which officials say will never happen.
But officials also privately acknowledge that the OMB document was not ready for broad distribution — reminding some of the early, hasty moves of his first term, when immigration bans from Muslim-majority countries and other orders were quickly lifted after legal challenges. It was very broad.
“Everybody was panicked and confused by that memo,” the senior administration official said. “And if you go back to the history of memos, none of them probably deserved any coverage — much less comprehensive coverage.”
But given the broad language of many of Trump’s executive orders, federal agencies will almost certainly need more specific guidance from the White House budget office to translate the president’s broad policy statements into action. At least one senior Trump administration official acknowledged Wednesday that rescinding the Office of Management and Budget memo would do little to resolve questions about what exactly is being cut, and that another memo would likely be needed.
Neither the White House nor a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget responded to a request for comment.
But within the federal agencies affected by the White House’s confusing guidance, the chaos has not abated. Grant recipients, who were notified by email Tuesday that not all grant recipients would be able to receive new payments temporarily, remain in a state of limbo. Even after some administrators later indicated that some payments would still be available, many of the aid programs it oversees continue to operate cautiously, unsure of what might be on the horizon.
“It’s complete chaos — no one knows what we’re allowed to do and tell grantees,” a Justice Department official said. “We don’t have clear and understandable guidelines from the leadership. Meetings are being cancelled left and right. We’re trying to get back into the swing of things assuming the usual action plan is in place. But everyone is being very cautious.”
The chaos also spread to hundreds of clinics across the country that provide free and subsidized birth control, STD testing and other services to millions of low-income people through Title funding, as Health and Human Services workers were barred from communicating with the outside world.
“People were trying to access [our government payment system] and no one could access it, and they were getting all kinds of messages,” said Claire Coleman, president of the National Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Health Association. “We didn’t know when that suspension would be lifted.”
Despite the funding being restored, Coleman warned that some clinics in the network are not receiving any other source of funding and would be forced to close if Title funding is restored. Right now, many are saving up money to have a buffer so they can continue to operate if that happens. However, Coleman fears that many of them will not be able to survive, especially if Medicaid funding is also frozen.
“I don’t care how many days you have cash, it’s existential,” she said.