This just in from Politico:
Trump’s budget office ordered an expansive freeze Monday of “all federal financial assistance,” a move that could halt payments within days to states and U.S. households that receive assistance like SNAP food aid.
In a two-page memo, the Office of Management and Budget ordered all federal agencies to temporarily suspend payments, while making clear that Social Security and Medicare won’t be affected.
"The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve," according to the memo [full transcript here], obtained by POLITICO. Three people authenticated its veracity.
Tuesday a.m., Politico: "Move fast and break things: The scale of the order is so broad — it cites federal spending totaling $3 trillion — that the initial reaction last night was confusion, with politicians, officials and aides all scrambling to figure out which programs and payments are in scope." The Bulwark: "Immediate speculation among those scrutinizing the letter was that things like food assistance, financial aid to students, grants for university-based research, and many other government functions could come to a stop. [This] could quickly turn into an acute constitutional crisis, with the executive branch essentially usurping the power of the purse from the legislative body." Another update from Politico:
— Despite assurances that Medicaid would be unaffected by the order, WaPo’s Dan Diamond hears that people are “reporting problems with the Medicaid payment system.”
— The online portal that distributes funds from the federally funded Head Start programs, which provide preschool assistance to hundreds of thousands of low-income children, is “warning providers of upcoming delays,” HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn reports.
On the personal, everyday level, no less than Leon Trotsky himself would be stupefied by these malignant s.o.b.s' contention that feeding the hungry "advances Marxist equity." I'm also reasonably familiar with Marxist tenets, and I'll be damned if I can determine how in hell even a self-evident malicious-to-a-T
gang of expert Marquis De Sades could have conjured such wording — and actually acted on it.
All federal agencies, all payments. I haven't one whit of doubt that the MAGA collective of ineffable morons thrilled to the news that all those Romneyesque "takers" are, at last, being slapped upside the head by the tough-daddy dickhead they adore.
But let's do keep in mind that these morons are in fact moronic, so much so that hundreds of thousands of them are momentarily forgetting that they're a social component of the "taking crowd," known in more sohisticated parts — meaning everywhere but MAGAville — as people needing to eat.
What will be their reaction when this epiphany finally descends on the blockheads? They'll need to behave as though their impending starvation troubles them not, that much is a given. Another is that they'll instantly and repeatedly beseech their neo-Nazi-sympathizing Christian god to send Word as to the precise meaning of "temporarily suspend[ed] payments."
Sen. Chuck Schumer's secular interpretation, which beats faux theology or any theology under the Constitution, is that any unilateral suspension of monies congressionally allocated "blatantly disobeys the law. Congress approved these investments and they are not optional."
Now on to the hard-to-swallow yet altogether necessary aspect of this sick, perverted, happily venomous memo from Satan's OMB. Good. Well done, you insufferable lowlifes who feed plentifully on the taxpayers' dime.
To hasten your demise and unkindly removal, maximum pain must fall on us all. It is to be vastly regretted that those of us least capable of taking the pain, as might an athlete in performance or wounded soldier in battle, will hurt the most. Neither my nor anyone's regrets will help; they won't, they cannot ease the deeply unjust anguish and agony heaved upon them by the sadistic bastards in Washington.
But the agony is a must. Positively indispensable is that the entire electorate be slapped upside the head by the evil pricks of Trumpism Central. (Pardon the profanity; it's not my custom in writing, I'm just boiling enraged.) Slapped good and hard and more than once. Only that will rattle their cages and cause them to look around or within; to witness what they hath wrought.
Then swear never again. And meanwhile, ask what they — we — can do to make the White House-cum-Dickens' Bleak House stagger its way to the most miserable existence and inglorious end possible.
***
They'll just blame the Democrats.
Well, look at it this way: if you feed people, inevitably some of those people will be Marxists. And once they are fed, they will likely want to continue promoting Marxist equity. So clearly the answer is, don’t feed anyone! That will show those commies!
Sadly, the pain has to be severe enough that it will make generations yet unborn wince before it will have any effect in the here and now.
What do you call it when someone mistakes basic human needs for political ideology?
Marx of ignorance.