Democrats in Congress were quick on Tuesday to call Donald Trump’s surprise freeze of federal aid a violation of the Constitution, noting that the president doesn’t have the authority to seize funds that Congress already appropriated.
But if you asked Republicans about Trump’s new directive, there was no issue at all.
“That’s a normal practice at the beginning of an administration, until they have an opportunity to review how the money is being spent,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Tuesday. “We’ll see kind of what the extent of it is, and what they’re, you know — what they intend to do in a more fulsome way. But, you know, for now, I think it’s just kind of a preliminary step that I think most administrations take.”
Of course, Democrats saw the order as anything but normal.
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Sen. Jeff Merkley said America was now facing “a constitutional crisis” over Trump’s aid freeze. Sen. Elizabeth Warren used those very same words — “constitutional crisis” — continuing that Trump was “attempting to seize power that under the Constitution does not belong to him.”
“Our first responsibility right now is for Congress to say, ‘No, Donald Trump is not king,’” Warren said.
Sen. Ron Wyden said the freeze amounted to “Donald Trump outdoing Richard Nixon.”
And the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray, said it was a “massive, massive overreach.”
But Republicans were straining to see the problem — at least constitutionally.
Although some GOP senators noted that the sudden pause on federal assistance had created chaos — Sens. Jerry Moran and John Boozman both said they were trying to figure out the implications, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski said her office’s phones were “ringing off the hook” — most Republicans were quite comfortable with the order.
“Look, he’s not going to shut it down forever, he’s just going to look at every program,” Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville said, adding that he didn’t understand why everyone was surprised by the order.
“He said he was gonna do it,” Tuberville said.
Other Republicans also claimed the pause on federal aid, which wasn’t mentioned on the campaign trail, was part of a broader promise.
“This is a pause. Our country is in a $2 trillion deficit this year,” Sen. Roger Marshall told reporters. “Seventy-seven million people elected President Trump to get control of this out-of-control spending by the federal government.”
Republicans, after consistently criticizing Democratic presidents for executive overreach, were confident this wasn’t beyond the bounds of Trump’s authority.
“Every administration, I think, is entitled to come in and do due diligence and see where the money’s going and whether they agree that it should continue,” Sen. John Cornyn said.
And when pressed on whether it was executive overreach, Cornyn was emphatic.
“I would call it due diligence,” he said, though he admitted he was surprised by the scope of the programs affected by the pause.
The Office of Management and Budget has already tried to scale back its order, claiming in a second memo on Tuesday that the pause was not “across-the-board.”
“It is expressly limited to programs, projects, and activities implicated by the President’s Executive Orders, such as ending [diversity, equity and inclusion], the green new deal, and funding nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest,” the new memo said.
But a more targeted reach in the federal aid freeze seemed to be a new development, after the first order — released Monday night — said all federal agencies needed to “complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the president’s executive orders.”
“In the interim,” the original memo continued, “to the extent permissible under applicable law, federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”
The only explicit exceptions in the first order were for Medicare and Social Security, as well as for “assistance received directly by individuals.”
Since a number of assistance programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Section 8 housing are federally funded but implemented through state governments, their status remains in limbo.
And while Democrats were seeking “clarifications,” as Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth said during a press call on Tuesday, Republicans were urging Americans not to overreact.
“This is a work in progress. Everybody take a deep breath. Stay calm,” Sen. Jim Risch said. “Every one of these programs is going to be looked at.”
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Katherine Swartz and Ben T.N. Mause are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
Margaret Manto, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.
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