patrick.net

What Trump has done was, until yesterday, unimaginable. ...

It came in two parts (so far). Yesterday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unleashed a two-page memo upon the entire federal government. It was nothing less than a multi-trillion-dollar, whole-of-government spending freeze, excepting only a small handful of essential items like Medicare, emergency relief, payrolls, and Social Security. Like that, Trump shut down the government.

You can be sure that nothing like this has ever happened before. It has completely flipped the script. Instead of Trump trying vainly to wrestle control over a vast bureaucracy, now the bureaucrats must come to Trump for permission to do anything.

Overnight, Trump has managed to turn the vast, out-of-control federal bureaucracy into a command-and-control system.

Here’s a link to a copy of the memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Read the whole thing. It’s only two pages, and it might be one of the single most significant government actions in our lifetimes. ...

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1884102029410234491

Starting at 5pm today, all government financial assistance (excluding the aforementioned categories) must be temporarily frozen until further notice, after Trump Administration officials can “review” all government expenses to “determine the best uses of the funding.” ...

If the President is the nation’s chief executive, shouldn’t everything be centralized in his office? And if it got out of control, shouldn’t some President get it back under control?

The second, companion order, described in the Politico article, was a “Stop Work” order issued on Friday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (and “clarified” yesterday). Rubio’s order shut down all foreign aid and operations, full stop, and also curtailed staff communication about the order, effective immediately. (Aid to Egypt and Israel were excepted, but it included Ukraine and Taiwan.)

Under the stop-work order, all state aid programs must be entered into a centralized database where they can be reviewed. Not one dollar can go out until that happens. Now, you might have already thought everything was in a centralized database, but no. And that is part of the problem.

Like the OMB Memo, Rubio’s stop-work order is a full-scale shutdown of U.S. foreign aid operations, going far beyond a normal policy review. By restricting all bureaucratic discretion, and freezing all existing contracts, it is one of the most aggressive funding halts in modern U.S. diplomatic history.

Between the OMB memo and the State Department stop-work order, the Trump Administration is forcing a total reset on federal spending, and collecting all spending into a centralized database where an agency like DOGE can have any hope of overseeing it.

It also means the Administration is forcing a total reset on federal policy, since spending is policy.

You could not possibly imagine a more disruptive strategy. It’s a live wire. You can mess around with DEI all you want and probably get away with it, but start messing with people’s money, and get ready for the fur to fly. The stoppage affects everything— red states, blue states, foreign countries, local governments, and perhaps most importantly, all the so-called NGOs. ...

Until now, government spending has operated on autopilot. Government money printer go brrrrrrr. Money flowed freely through an opaque, closed-top strainer, without transparency or direct executive oversight, and bureaucracies, NGOs, and foreign governments knew they would always get paid regardless of who was in the White House.

Trump just ended that assumption. This moment will forever be remembered as a turning point in American governance.

One of the biggest sources of funding for NGO’s —especially foreign NGO’s— is the State Department’s USAID, which many have long suspected was a CIA front for destabilization operations. According to the Kiev Post, USAID has distributed over $30 billion dollars to Ukrainian NGOs and contractors, a vast uncharted ocean of misspent money.

USAID is the deep state’s ATM.

Yesterday, the AP ran a story related to the financial freeze orders, headlined “US places dozens of senior aid officials on leave, citing possible resistance to Trump orders.”

According to the AP, 56 senior USAID personnel and “hundreds of contractors” were placed on immediate administrative leave yesterday, pending review, which is the closest thing to getting fired career bureaucrats get.

The dramatic USAID purge seems related to malicious compliance inside the agency. Someone leaked an internal USAID memo sent late yesterday, which quoted new acting administrator Jason Gray, who said he had identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”

Boom.

If Trump succeeds in these agency purges, and gathers the money strings back under White House control, in one transparent database, then the deep state as we knew it is finished.