OMB freezes all DOMESTIC and foreign disbursements | OMB order rescinded (but maybe not?) - BUT - EO still stands (trying to get around stay?)



Trump claims he stopped a shipment of $50 million in condoms to Hamas AND that “they’ve used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?”

Fact check: $50 million for condoms in Gaza? Five big reasons to be skeptical Trump’s story is true​



“
During her first official White House briefing as President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt announced that Trump had prevented a “preposterous waste of taxpayer money.” Trump’s team, she said, used the president’s pause on foreign aid to thwart a plan in which “there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.”

Leavitt’s Tuesday comments made headlines around the world. And the president himself told an even more dramatic version of the story in a speech on Wednesday, saying that “we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”

… The White House offered no evidence for the story: Leavitt provided no proof for her claim that there was ever a federal plan to spend $50 million on condoms in Gaza. And when CNN asked Leavitt and her colleagues for any evidence, another White House official instead pointed us to comments from the State Department — comments that, as we’ll discuss below, did not even repeat Leavitt’s claim of a planned $50 million Gaza condom expenditure, let alone prove the claim.

… In three previous years under Biden, USAID spent no money on condoms in the entire Middle East: A detailed federal report published last year said USAID did not provide or fund any condoms in the Middle East in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.

… Total worldwide USAID condom spending is far less than $50 million: In the 2023 fiscal year, USAID provided or funded a global total of about $7.1 million worth of male condoms and about $1.1 million worth of female condoms, overwhelmingly to countries in Africa, according to the federal report.

… The State Department would not repeat Leavitt’s claim: … Instead, Bruce was vague about how much condom spending was supposedly stopped. She wrote: “Example 1: Condoms. Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception.” She did not specify how much of the $102 million in funding was intended for contraception, let alone for condoms in particular. …”
 


“I’m restating right now to correct any confusion that the media has purposefully and somehow for whatever reason created Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have not been affected by any action we’re taking in any way, shape or form. We are merely looking at parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud …”
 
nycfan said:


“I’m restating right now to correct any confusion that the media has purposefully and somehow for whatever reason created Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have not been affected by any action we’re taking in any way, shape or form. We are merely looking at parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud …”
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He is the biggest waste and fraud there is.

Even if those are not affected there are still millions affected and harmed by this idiotic freeze.
 
nycfan said:
I wonder if they are trying to circumvent the stay (which was based on the OMB order)?
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Well, that's the thing. I very much doubt Judge AliKhan has any idea how to address the legal issues. This memo shows up in the news; less than 24 hours later, plaintiffs are in her court asking for an injunction; and she doesn't even know what the fuck it is. So she entered an administrative way, which is basically a brief pause to let the court figure out what the case is all about. Good luck to her.

Judge AliKhan probably has a better idea than I do, which isn't hard because I don't really know how to address the issues here. It's either kind of complicated, or trivially simple. A preview:

1. The trivially simple case: the memo does nothing so plaintiffs have no standing to challenge it. This is a version of Calheel's argument, which is that the court will ultimately have nothing to say about the legality of this memo and the funding freeze. But here, I am going to separate the memo and the funding freeze because they are technically different.

As for the memo: I think most people who follow politics have by now picked up that plaintiffs have no standing to pursue cases unless they have been suffered a concrete injury. That's true, and there's another requirement as well -- the injury has to be remediable by an order from the court. So is there an injury? Arguably no: the order itself doesn't do anything. The injury comes downstream, from the agencies that freeze the funds -- and presumably, then, that's who should be sued. Sure, it's laborious and time-consuming and can't be done quickly enough to prevent irreparable injury, but that's our litigation system.

And there's a real question as to what the court can do. OK, OMB has rescinded the memo. Now Trump calls each department head and tells them to do what's in the memo. Same result. It's more inconvenient for the president, but whatever. And if this is the case, if Trump can create the same state of affairs without the memo, then who cares about the memo?

It's worth noting that OMB is almost never sued, to my knowledge. Indeed, I can't remember a case in which OMB was a defendant (and here I'm not counting cases that might address something like its employment policies, which is a different matter). And that's because OMB is not usually doing anything public-facing. It promulgates no regulations. It makes no law.

I suspect that the court will end up at this point in some fashion. I don't think the plaintiffs have standing to challenge the memo itself. And since it's been withdrawn, it's moot anyway. However: (next post)
 
But wait! One of the MAGAt whores on this very board said that Trump is "kickin' ass"- maybe he's kicking his own ass?
 


LOLOLOL what a stupid fucking administration. It is so much fun watching the MAGAt bootlickers on this board twist themselves into knots to defend this stuff.
 
nycfan said:
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Yep, this can be the basis for the follow-up post referred to above. So if the plaintiffs don't have standing to challenge the memo itself, it doesn't mean the case is over. Now we're getting to some speculative stuff, though (at least speculative for me -- perhaps for admin law specialists, it's a bit less so).

3. The president clearly has a policy of freezing appropriations. The memo confirmed it. So one could interpret a lawsuit over the memo as a form of mandatory joinder of defendants. That is, it allows the judge to simultaneously assess the legality of the funding freeze across agencies at the same time. It's a shorthand for suing all agencies of the government at the same time.

I don't think going after the memo itself is the best legal strategy, but I'll cut the states a lot of slack here. It's pretty hard to come up with an airtight legal theory in 24 hours. I would do something like certify a defendant class action, naming every federal agency to which the OMB memo was addressed. Note that I am not a litigator and certainly not a class action litigator, so my ability to throw around terminology like "defendant class action" should not be interpreted as me knowing how they work in practice. My best guess, as me, is that a defendant class action or something similar would be better.

I think this is why they quickly rescinded the memo. The lawyers miscalculated and didn't realize the memo could be subject to attack. And now that it has been, the lawyers realized that the existence of the memo threatened the whole scheme. If it had never been published, there would be no easy way to join all the agencies in one suit. But withdrawing the memo now is putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Operational or not, it still provides concrete evidence that all of these pauses are part of the same plan.

4. Note that the lawsuit in front of O'Donnell -- the one brought by Letitia -- appears to be different. It isn't challenging the memo, but rather the funding freeze itself. I don't know which agencies, as I haven't looked at the complaint itself and don't have time to do so. In this action, the states clearly have standing -- the injury is real, and the injury is remediable. On the other hand, the plaintiffs would arguably have to identify all of the program pauses injuring them, and go through the injunction analysis for each case. You'd probably be able to group up the programs to some degree -- perhaps by agency, perhaps by authorizing/appropriating statutes -- but it would be a lot more work and take longer.

Note: the first main point of #4 is wrong. I thought Tish was challenging the medicaid pause specifically. She's not. The two cases are almost identical; the one in front of AliKhan was brought by private entities and the state AG case is in front of Judge McConnell.

But the other main point -- that plaintiffs can challenge the funding freeze agency by agency -- is not so affected. I'm pretty sure that's right, in some way. I also suspect that there's a way to consolidate the lawsuits; maybe a defendant class action isn't the way to do it, but something akin to that perhaps. Our litigators here might have better insight.
 
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CFordUNC said:
Lmao what a colossally fucking moronic administration. So unbelievably inept (thank God).
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One of my only sources of hope for the next 4 years is that Trump & friends didn't learn enough from term 1 and the ineptitude will again be enough to stop a significant amount of the harm that Trump would like to do.

I'm not confident that it will happen, but I'd like to think I'm hopeful.
 
Can anyone find a precedent for a Fortune 500 company (a) issuing a directive that freezes payments indefinitely, and then (b) rescinds the directive THE FOLLOWING GODDAMN DAY because every person in the free world pointed out how stupid the directive was?

Giant companies have been sent straight to bankruptcy over far less incompetence than this. Godalmighty, anyone defending this train wreck of an administration must have no experience whatsoever with complex business decision-making.
 
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