WASHINGTON (TNS) — Donald Trump owes a debt of gratitude to Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan, who blocked his vague order this week temporarily shutting down grants and loans across the federal government.
In an effort to dial back far-left political spending and woke ideology larded throughout government grant programs, the order from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget appeared to lump government-funded basics people depend on such as Medicaid, Meals on Wheels and student lunches in with the frippery Trump wanted to stop.
The judge’s preliminary decision holding up OMB’s spending freeze came just minutes before chaos was to be fully unleashed, most likely requiring an embarrassed walk-back after howls from Trump’s own backers reached Washington. After struggling to explain its thinking, the Trump administration rescinded it Wednesday, letting the judge’s decision stand.
Like a lot of what the ambitious Trump administration has already begun to implement, the plan was half-baked. It had good intentions, or at least intentions that matched the agenda Trump ran on, but didn’t consider the detail work that actual governing requires and that campaign rhetoric does not.
Trump is right that the recent Biden and Obama administrations have secreted a liberal agenda throughout government spending that doesn’t belong there.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, the National Institutes of Health has a Biden-era program intended to help staff up biomedical research at colleges and universities called Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation grants. Sounds like something that might pay off in better drugs and treatments that might improve people’s health, but that’s not all the program does. It requires schools to adopt ideological litmus tests called “diversity statements” in their hiring with the incentive of a quarter-billion dollar carrot.
Trump, quite reasonably, wants the NIH to focus its grant-making on the most efficient ways of improving health care outcomes through research, not focus on institutionalizing the methods of diversity, equity and inclusion-obsessed Democrats.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Inflation Reduction Act passed under Biden included $2.8 billion for grants to advance “environmental justice” — the idea that minorities have been victimized by industry decisions to target pollution at their communities. In practice, what grants have been released have focused on backing anti-development political activists bent on slowing down the economy that Trump says he wants to make great again.
There’s no requirement that the anti-development groups now spending millions of federal dollars actually have the backing of the minority communities they profess to represent and who might be the very people who would benefit from more economic development. Indeed, some of the efforts to stop development are in areas of cities around the country where it is federal tax policy that targets development there, not racist corporations.
Trump staffers told me that the president wants grants for new research on controversial topics such as health care for transgender children to include requirements that the results be published in a reasonable amount of time. The concern comes after federally-funded research that showed no positive mental health effects from puberty blockers taken by trans kids was hidden for years by a doctor who told The New York Times that she was concerned about the political implications of her work.
Those seem like reasonable goals. And surely it isn’t a problem to pause spending at the beginning of a new administration to review plans for unspent money to see if there is political nonsense going on that should be stopped.
Indeed, most of the money targeted by Trump isn’t specifically allocated by Congress. Most of the spending is set in broad categories that a left-leaning bureaucracy gets to decide how to spend.
Well, elections have consequences. That bureaucracy now reports to Donald Trump as the head of the executive branch. Moreover, Trump is in the midst of an effort to begin reforming the leftward tilt of Washington’s permanent government.
Trump should use the time that Judge AliKhan’s order has given him to get the details right and make sure regular Americans are not hurt as he and his administration try to drain what they call The Swamp.
(David Mastio is an opinion columnist for the Kansas City Star/McClatchy Newspapers.)
