Posted on Wednesday, January 29, 2025

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by Outside Contributor

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Amid all the uproar over President Donald Trump’s spending freeze—now delayed by a judge appointed by President Joe Biden—there’s some critical context missing.

On Monday, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to federal agencies calling for a temporary pause on spending for grants, loans, and financial assistance. (On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan paused the freeze temporarily.)

The pause is not a wholesale cancelation of congressionally directed spending, as the media is reporting. It is not only necessary to earnestly comply with the series of executive orders issued by Trump affecting agency functions, but it is also a practice utilized by Democrat administrations. Moreover, there is a vital context that has been almost completely ignored by the mainstream media: the equally unprecedented radicalism of the Biden administration.

When placed in context the pause makes much more sense.

On inauguration day, Trump issued a sweeping series of executive orders affecting regulations, prosecutions, the federal workforce, border security, and more.

Additional guidance on the spending pause linked the pause to Trump’s executive orders on foreign aid, the immigration crisis, energy, and identity politics. Meanwhile, functions such as military procurement, Social Security payments, and federal/state partnership programs would be unaffected.

If federal agencies and programs had been properly operating based on underlying statutes, there would be much less need for a dramatic spending pause. Sadly, that has not been the status quo for the last several years.

The Biden administration twisted as much of the federal government as possible into serving the agenda of the activist left. This meant that all agencies created race-obsessed “equity action plans,” infrastructure programs had to prioritize “environmental justice” and “climate change,” and foreign aid was used to push divisive abortion and gender ideology overseas.

Deliberate administrative decisions implemented by Biden and his handlers resulted in untold billions of dollars being used for the promotion of leftist ideology and organizations. Examples include:

• The Senate Commerce Committee issued a blockbuster report revealing how the National Science Foundation issued thousands of grants at a cost of over $2 billion towards promoting neo-Marxist concepts in a variety of scientific fields during Biden’s tenure.
• The Biden administration made sure the “Green New Deal” helped politically friendly non-governmental organizations. Groups such as the Climate United fund ($7 billion), Coalition for Green Capital ($5 billion), the Opportunity Finance Network ($2.29 billion), Power Forward Communities ($2 billion), and the Justice Climate Fund ($940 million) now control de facto slush funds that are clearly designed to benefit groups associated with the Democratic party.
• Under Biden, the Department of Health and Human Services issued numerous grants in support of the transgender movement, which included giving tax dollars to groups encouraging youth to undergo gender transitions.
• The National Institutes of Health funded a $125 million “public health racial justice competency model” designed to inject aspects of critical race theory into the healthcare system.

While Trump’s executive orders will make some headway in dragging federal agencies toward the center, there is still an unknown number of additional orders, guidance documents, training, and regulations that will be needed to undo the wreckage left in Biden’s wake.

Given that there are hundreds of federal bureaus and thousands of programs, this cannot happen overnight. Thus, the only way to stop the Biden-style waste and abuse of tax dollars is to freeze the funds in place.

However, even if the Trump administration’s initiative is successful, Congress must do its part to permanently eliminate federal support of leftist institutions and ideology. Fully defunding the left would mean:

• Reining in the massive subsidization of higher education, which not only causes inflated tuition prices but also enables academia to embark on ideological crusades.
• Ending back-door handouts to universities in the form of of excessive “indirect cost” payments from science agencies.
• Stopping the crusade undertaken by the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to micromanage the country’s energy supply. In particular, fully eliminating the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” is an urgent priority.

Trump’s spending freeze kicks off the first of many fiscal fights in the next few years. With the gross national debt now $36.2 trillion and inflation still well above pre-pandemic levels, it’s vital for leaders in Washington to do the right thing and protect America’s hard-earned dollars.

David Ditch is a senior policy analyst in budget policy in the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation.

Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By David Ditch

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.