Chutzpah or mishegoss?

The Trump OMB announced yesterday a pause on government spending.

“The memo required agencies to pause all spending, with a footnote exempting “assistance received directly by individuals.” HHS suspended states from drawing down Medicaid funds and tribal facilities from drawing down Indian Health Service Funds. Also suspended were grants that provide funds for Head Start, child care, LIHEAP, and more. By midday yesterday, OMB issued a corrective note explaining that the footnote excluded Medicaid and Head Start, as well as other programs like SNAP and Pell grants. That was good, if incoherent, since Medicaid makes payments through intermediaries (states, which may in turn pay managed care organizations which pay providers) as much as any federal program. And the order leaves in the crosshairs, just at HHS, programs offering drug treatment and mental health services, funding foster care, serving the homeless, engaging in medical research, and on and on.

 

“Smart lawyers have focused on the question whether the delay violates the Impoundment Control Act (sure seems to), but there’s another problem. The actions now unfolding may well violate the terms of any number of grant agreements. Grant agreements bind two parties—not only the grantee, but also the government. Here’s a snippet from the key text, the Uniform Grants Guidance:

 

“Payments for allowable costs must not be withheld at any time during the period of performance unless required by Federal statute, regulations, or in one of the following instances: (i) The recipient or subrecipient has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the Federal award; or (ii) The recipient or subrecipient is delinquent in a debt….

 

“OMB says it is seeking to “cancel awards already awarded that are in conflict with Administration priorities,” but there are rules for that too. The first Trump Administration instructed agencies to make it easier to terminate grants, while the Biden Administration made it harder. Depending on the timing and the agency, these directions will be captured differently in actual agreements. Even under the old Trump guidance, the grant agreement had to include the terms allowing for the termination, and the government’s actions had to be consistent with those terms. In some circumstances, HHS grantees can appeal to the Department Appeals Board. And they can go to the courts, under the Administrative Procedure Act, as several just did, winning a temporary reprieve.”

Boldness? Sloppiness? Stupidity? What’s obvious is that these decisions will cost money, both to defend and to repair damage. Who’s in charge here? Oh, yeah.

https://open.substack.com/pub/eatingpolicy/p/vast-carelessness?r=2133ns&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more