And it’s a loyalty-test moment.
This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.
Donald Trump’s budget office on Monday issued a memo shutting down huge swaths of the American economy and pausing the country’s basic ability to function. The memo suspended all federal grants and loans—money approved by Congress, and going to things like disaster relief, transportation, education and aid to the needy—until each recipient writes a detailed report about where the funds are going, to be sure no money is going to “Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies,” among other apparent ideological no-nos.
The memo itself is partly nonsensical: The Green New Deal is not a social engineering policy, nor was it ever passed into law; Marx did not invent DEI. But it’s clear enough what it means: trillions of dollars that would otherwise be in the U.S. economy, funding crucial services Americans depend on every single day, suddenly unavailable.
Late on Tuesday, a federal judge intervened (prompted by pro-democracy nonprofits who brought a suit), temporarily blocking the effort right before it was set to take effect—but the judge’s pause is only in effect until until Monday, Feb. 3. In the meantime, organizations are scrambling, and online Medicaid portals throughout the country were affected all day on Tuesday. (The outage seems to have stopped late Tuesday evening.)
This is a dangerous and potentially deadly and seems primed to piss a lot of people off. Conservatives may say they like small government, but in reality people expect that they’ll have open public schools and emergency rooms, functioning fire departments and roads, and organizations primed to help those who are homeless or hungry or sick or suicidal or escaping domestic violence. There are a small number of highly ideological libertarian-leaning conservatives who want to gut government because they believe that the federal bureaucracy is far too large. But I’m not sure that’s actually what’s going on here.
Trump is not a small-government conservative because he read Ayn Rand in college. He’s a government-of-one conservative: an authoritarian.
This is part of several broader efforts on the part of the Trump White House to
- consolidate power in the president simply by grabbing it and assuming Congress and the Supreme Court will acquiesce;
- demand ideological conformity or else;
- test just how far he can push his own party; and
- root out any hint of disloyalty and instill terror in anyone who might question the president.
The first step is calling this what it is. not a ‘temporary freeze,’ but a wholesale upending of the constitutional order, and the kind of thing that demands refusal, not submission.
One of Trump’s earliest moves as president was to insist that “DEI”—diversity, equity and inclusion efforts—be stripped from the federal government. And what he meant by that wasn’t simply that DEI efforts be stripped from the federal government—as in ending efforts to diversify various parts of government or to fight racism. What he meant was that discrimination on the basis of race or sex should be permitted to return, white men should retake power, and anyone who objects should be ferreted out and fired. He demanded the firing of anyone in government whose role was DEI-related. And he demanded that other government employees snitch on colleagues they suspected of promoting DEI.
Traditionally, federal employees have been told to rat out colleagues only under pretty egregious circumstances, like if they suspected someone was a spy for a foreign government, or if they were stealing or engaging in some form of corruption. Trump added “promotes diversity” to that list. This is one convenient way of enforcing ideological conformity in government, given that the group of people who believes diversity, equity and inclusion are bad—not just that some DEI efforts are misguided or wrongheaded, but that the goal of a diverse and equitable workforce is a bad goal—is a pretty small one. But it’s one almost entirely aligned with Trump.
This is a loyalty test. This is a purge.
The budget memo functions similarly. Trump just grabbed power out of Congress’ hands. Will Republican members object? Will they push back?
This is a big deal—their constituents back home, including many Trump supporters, may be hit hard. This is bad for American citizens and bad for the economy. It is certainly bad for the separation of powers, as it undermines Congress’ power and its reason for existing.
So far, Republicans have totally capitulated to Trump. Pete Hegseth was a major test: Would they confirm a clearly unqualified dangerously uncontrolled alcoholic to run America’s national defense? They did.
And capitulation, as Adrienne LaFrance put it in The Atlantic, is contagious: It’s not just Republicans who are folding to Trump; it’s business leaders and tech executives and even many Democrats and liberals and media outlets and even Google maps.
Part of this is the outcome of the White House’s “flood the zone” strategy of doing so much bad stuff all at once that no one can keep up. But a bigger part of it is just some combination of fear, cowardice and avarice.
Everything everywhere all at once is indeed an overwhelming strategy. But it is also a choice to be overwhelmed. You can’t fight on every front. But you can choose to fight somewhere. And the lack of fight has been astonishing.
What Trump has done here is not just a funding pause. It is a test: Will members of Congress comply with increasingly extreme acts—acts that strip their power, publicly humiliate them and anger their constituents? Will Congress and the public agree that in order to receive federal funding that Congress has already allocated, every single agency and organization that receives such funding has to demonstrate their loyalty to far-right Trumpian ideology? Will the people who make up the federal government decide that the foundation of American democracy—the separation of powers, put into place in part to ensure that the nation would be governed by representatives of people and not a singular king—is worth preserving?
The point of this is not actually to shrink the government or increase efficiency, although some conservatives will sell it that way. It is to instill fear—to send a message that if you don’t bend to the leader’s will, the leader will destroy you. It is to force ideological conformity—to push out of government and even government-adjacent jobs anyone with even a hint of liberalism or MAGA skepticism (even a hint of dedication to something bigger than Donald Trump).
What the president has done is illegal. It’s a blatant power grab. It’s a blatant intimidation attempt. He’s not hiding any of this; he’s seizing authority that is not his and humiliating Congress and defying the separation of powers right out in the open.
But he’s not all-powerful; he will try to be as powerful as he can be, but he will only be as powerful as he can be.
Those around him, and with competing or (theoretically) coequal powers can, in fact, challenge him, refuse him and defy him. We can choose defiance, and demand that those we’ve put in office choose defiance, too. But the first step is calling this what it is. not a “temporary freeze,” but a wholesale upending of the constitutional order, and the kind of thing that demands refusal, not submission.
