Washington (CNN) – The Trump administration’s biggest swing at radically reshaping federal spending lasted just under 45 hours. A sweeping freeze on trillions in federal spending for grants and loans, issued Monday night by the White House budget office to federal agencies, sparked outrage and confusion – even among fellow Republicans.
The White House insisted that the confusion was a media-led creation, but on Wednesday the Office of Management and Budget issued a terse two-sentence memo rescinding the directive it had issued just two days prior. The withdrawal of the federal freeze was a stunning about-face for President Donald Trump’s White House, which has so far pushed the envelope to reshape the federal government.
Congressional Republicans were privately frustrated that they weren’t given a heads up on a decision that stirred a direct deluge of outrage from constituents. “We were in the dark, like everyone else,” a Republican senator told CNN, speaking of the freeze on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the West Wing.
The reversal revived questions of competence – even among the president’s admirers – about the administration’s ability to govern or adequately explain its decisions. The fallout from Monday’s OMB memo was reminiscent of the chaos that often plagued Trump’s West Wing in his first term.
Despite the controversy, the White House maintained that the decision was a necessary step to control federal spending and reduce waste and fraud. Trump himself said during his first bill-signing ceremony that the administration was simply looking at “parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud and abuse.”
However, the brief saga also created an opening for Democrats to capitalize on what they saw as a Trump misstep. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held a press conference to condemn the administration’s approach and argued that it was an example of Trump’s “misguided” effort to “radically reshape the federal government.”