Initially, the most striking detail in the White House Office of Management and Budget memo that has put a “pause” on huge swathes of the American economy, is how unhinged the paranoia is. The order insists that all federal grant and loan spending must be halted to combat “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” Ordinary people may see nothing but a local bridge being repaired, broadband internet being installed or a park getting cleaned up. Through MAGA-colored glasses, it’s all a plot to turn you into transgender Marxists and probably vegans, who are worse than Satanists.
(As of Tuesday evening, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., has temporarily blocked the funding freeze in response to a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. A separate lawsuit contesting the order has also been filed in Rhode Island by attorneys general for 22 states and the District of Columbia.)
Despite claiming to stand for “hardworking American families” — who are typically considered to be a different category of human beings than woke Marxist transgender green-dealers, at least within the Fox Cinematic Universe — this new executive order from Donald Trump’s White House is a loaded shotgun aimed at every American who is not a billionaire hiding out in his apocalypse bunker. Elon Musk and his DOGE buddies may believe that federal grants and loans all go to frog-gender research and DEI knitting circles, but the vast majority of that money goes for banal but necessary investments into people’s everyday lives: infrastructure maintenance and building, federal loan programs for mortgages and small businesses, food assistance, student loans, disaster relief and school programs like Head Start, to name a few. Oh yeah, and federal health care programs like Medicaid and CHIP, which cover nearly a quarter of all Americans.
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The language of the OMB memo is confusing, no doubt by design. At this writing, it’s not entirely clear yet how broad the order is meant to be or how it will be enforced (if and when it goes into effect). States are already reporting a shutdown of Medicaid, suggesting that the goal is wholesale and indiscriminate destruction. The memo itself claims it’s intended to halt $3 trillion in spending. While that’s an implausibly huge number, even a fraction of that sum would result in widespread economic chaos, even for folks who don’t believe they benefit from federal spending.
This money, by and large, goes directly back into the national economy. Cutting off everyone from construction workers building roads to SNAP recipients means that money doesn’t get spent on groceries, rent and mortgages, consumer goods of all kinds, travel and entertainment and so on. The downstream effects on the rest of the economy could, without exaggeration, be catastrophic. Even if the “pause” is intended to be temporary, as the White House claims, the economic damage will be severe. As Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said on Twitter, “In a blitzkrieg, Trump is trying to collapse our democracy — and probably our economy — and seize control.”
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The memo reads like it was written by an AI bot trained exclusively on Twitter accounts that follow Elon Musk, but there’s no doubt who’s behind this Dr. Strangelove effort to launch a nuclear bomb right at the heart of the American economy: Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist ghoul Trump nominated to run the OMB. Vought pretended to be a mild-mannered public servant during his confirmation hearing last week, but over the past few years, especially in his leadership of Project 2025, he has revealed himself as a terrifying ideologue fixated on a fantasy of destroying the United States in order to rebuild it as a Christian theocracy.
Incoming budget boss Russ Vought has convinced himself that America is so far gone, that there’s no way to redeem the democratic, constitutional order. It’s the “we must end our civilization in order to save it” mentality.
As John Knefel at Media Matters reported in July, Vought proudly calls himself a Christian nationalist and believes the U.S. should be governed by a “biblical worldview,” in which his flavor of fundamentalism is imposed by fiat on the entire nation. He has repeatedly complained that secularism has led to “multiculturalism,” “critical race theory” and “transgender contagion.” Over the years, he has convinced himself that America is so far gone, thanks to all these supposed evils, that there’s no way to redeem the democratic, constitutional order. It’s a standard “we must end our civilization in order to save it” mentality, and he’s as serious as cancer about this.
Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer laid out Vought’s worldview in an alarming essay in November, noting that Vought argues that we now live in a “post-constitutional moment,” and that a Republican president — such as the one we’ve got now — should function like a dictator, with virtually unlimited powers uncontained by Congress or the law. This outlandish move to unilaterally halt most federal spending is in line with this view. Of course it’s both illegal and unconstitutional: Congress authorized that spending, and the president has no legal right to override its authority. But in Vought’s worldview, nuking the constitutional order is necessary and justified because of the “woke” emergency. Zimmer explained all this further Tuesday on Bluesky, writing: “The Right today is dominated by people like Vought who are convinced there is nothing left to conserve — that our moment requires not ‘conservatism,’ but a radical ‘counter-revolution.'”
The Right today is dominated by people like Vought who are convinced there is nothing left to conserve – that our moment requires not “conservatism,” but a radical “counter-revolution.” They have never been so close to power as they are now. And they are determined to abuse power ruthlessly.
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— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 12:29 PM
The heavy usage of scare terms like “transgender contagion,” “woke” and “Marxism” is meant to reassure ordinary Americans that someone else is being targeted by these grotesque MAGA power plays, and not them. But if you examine how terms like “Marxist” and “woke” function in these circles, it becomes clear that they’re talking about a majority of Americans, including many or most Republican voters. In reading the Project 2025 policy document, which guides Trump’s executive orders, it’s striking that almost no one escapes condemnation as part of what is sneeringly referred to as the “Great Awokening” of America.
“Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” the document declares, putting single people and queer people into the category of woke un-people. Anyone who works for the government, from sanitation workers to IRS agents, is demonized as a corrupt parasite who only wants to “serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.” (Never mind that Vought and Trump themselves receive government paychecks.) The entire public school system, “public libraries and public health agencies” and pretty much every federal agency except, presumably, the military, is described as a “power center held by the Left.”
What’s most striking here is the totalizing theory detailed in Project 2025 that America is hopelessly “woke,” and that most Americans have been consumed by what Vought and his ilk see as secular decadence. Project 2025 authors present a view of the nation as a diseased entity that can only be purified by fire. It’s certainly ironic that someone who claims to despise bureaucracy as much as Vought has embraced the bureaucratic approach to Armageddon: simply stopping the checks. But of course, the essence of MAGA is psychological projection, in this case refracted through his frankly theocratic worldview. Democrats are begging Senate Republicans not to confirm a man who openly intends to end their constitutional powers in favor of turning Donald Trump into a dictator, with himself as the dictator’s right-hand man. I will make the bold prediction right now that Senate Republicans will refuse to listen.
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