U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan halted Trump’s massive government funding freeze mere minutes before it took effect this week, but the announcement still sent shockwaves through food assistance programs, higher education, and arts and humanities industries.
In addition to critical welfare and social safety net programs, many imperiled initiatives included Department of Health and Human Services departments dealing with disease prevention, nurse training, AIDS and pandemic preparation and rural health centers.
Educators say local Mississippi colleges immediately felt the impact.
“We wrote some grants to help students last year, but now they’re probably on hold, and we have to deal with that,” said a Mississippi college teacher who was not willing to be named for fear of local or federal retaliation. “These weren’t grants we were writing. They were already written and approved, and suddenly the government wants to put them on hold when our students were counting on them. It’s a lot to deal with.”
An administrator at a southern art museum, who also refused to use his name due to his institution’s reliance upon federal humanities initiatives, said at least one two-year grant he had won last year was now on hold just as the museum was preparing to use it to fund a massive system upgrade. The grant, worth more than $250K, was slated to pay for software, equipment and the hiring of three two-year employees with full benefits to install and service the upgrades.
“Some people play down the importance of arts and humanities money, but it 100% pays bills and hires people. If you shut it all down, you will see how it affects the economy,” the official told BGX.
Higher education institutions, particularly those serving low-income students, heavily rely on government departments like the U.S. Department of Education, among other benefactors, to supplement students’ exploding college costs. Museums, meanwhile, rely on federally linked organizations like the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The NEH, NEA and IMLS are all purported to be “independent” but are inextricably tied to federal money. Trump seeks to exploit that financial link to demand subservience in addition to an ideological purge of elements that don’t conform to his initiative of “ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government …” according to Monday’s order.
Trump claims the American people “gave him a mandate” to politicize every aspect of the U.S. government — despite his winning margin of 2.5 million voters being smaller than in any election going back to 2000 and the fifth-smallest popular vote margin since 1960.
“What a ham-handed way to run a government."
The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) memo quickly sowed panic across the nation by threatening financial lifelines among Medicaid beneficiaries and child welfare officials, but it also ordered a halt to virtually all federal spending on social services and federal programs subject to Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, which funds foster care, adoption assistance and child abuse and neglect block grants. It could additionally impact programs designed to educate young adults aging out of child adoption services at a critical time of life that often determines whether they can be self-sufficient adults.
Attorneys general in 22 states, including California and New York, threatened legal action within hours to save health care funding. California AG Rob Bonta said the order’s wording was vague “by design” and intended to cause uncertainty. He called the order “reckless and dangerous.”
“What a ham-handed way to run a government,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Naronha, who also slammed the memo as written deliberately to be “barely understandable."
In addition to potentially shutting down millions of Department of Agriculture dollars, Trump’s hammy hands were already affecting other aspects of arts and culture before he’d fully lurched into the White House. The museum official confirmed to BGX that Trump’s proposed tariffs had already forced his arts center to cancel at least one elaborate European art exhibit this year.
“Tariffs don’t just affect your cars and coffee. They’re a tax on shipping,” he said. “Getting exhibition pieces on a boat and shipped to the U.S. costs more when the president threatens a tariff, so we lost that one a few weeks ago. Nobody here will get to see that exhibit this year, or probably ever now.”
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