There Is a Strategy Behind the Chaos

The great federal-grant freeze of 2025 is over, but don’t expect it to be gone for good.

The Office of Management and Budget, which issued a memo freezing grants on Monday, has revoked it, The Washington Post first reported. The whole thing went so fast that many people may have never had a chance to sort out what was happening. Yesterday, amid widespread confusion about what the order did or didn’t do, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was unable to answer specific questions about it. State and local officials of both parties were bewildered, and yesterday afternoon, a federal judge blocked the order. Today, OMB folded—at least for now. The White House says that it has withdrawn the grant freeze in the memo, but not the executive orders mentioned in it, some of which assert a freeze on spending. Part of the goal appears to be to short-circuit court proceedings that might produce an unfavorable ruling.

This episode resembles the incompetent fumbling of the first Trump administration, especially its earliest days. But this was no fluke and no ad hoc move. It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch, and this week’s drama is better understood as a battle over priorities within the Republican Party than as unmanaged chaos.

The abortive grant freeze is an example of the second Trump administration’s strategy to drastically deploy executive power as part of a bigger, and somewhat paradoxical, gambit to shrink the federal government as a whole. “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” the current OMB head, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration convened by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank. The strategy is to seize power and dare both Congress and the courts to stop it. This tactic is unpredictable, as this week’s misadventures show, but it’s also relatively low-risk. The ideologues inside the administration want to see what they can get away with, and if it doesn’t work, so be it.

[Read: ‘It’s an illegal executive order. And it’s stealing.’]

But the administration has other staffers who are more responsive to politics. President Donald Trump, for example, has relatively weak ideological commitments. The court injunction yesterday was a nuisance, but what really seems to have done in the freeze was the backlash—not so much from the public, but from state and local officials, including many Republicans, who were outraged about the withdrawal of funds and lack of communication. The political team won this round over the ideologues, but there will be more.

At a mechanical level, the fight over the freeze was a battle over impoundment, the power of the executive branch to not spend money appropriated by Congress. Federal law on this is as settled as any: A law passed in 1974 prevents impoundment, except in cases where the president seeks permission from Congress. But Trump and some of his aides argue that that law is unconstitutional.

In a letter to Congress in the last days of the first Trump administration, Vought (then the head of OMB) wrote that the law “is unworkable in practice and should be significantly reformed or repealed.” In September, the attorney Mark Paoletta co-wrote a report for Vought’s nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, arguing that the power of impoundment was constitutional; Trump has now appointed Paoletta the general counsel of OMB, a position he also held in Trump’s first administration. And as my colleague Russell Berman reported yesterday, Vought refused to commit to abiding by the Impoundment Control Act during his confirmation hearings. And Vought and his allies had a plan for how to knock it down.

“President Trump will take action to challenge the constitutionality of limits placed on the Impoundment Power,” the Trump presidential campaign said—in other words, he planned to disobey the law, litigate any challenges, and hope to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court. It’s worked in the past.

This all goes to show that sometimes the chaos has a strategy behind it. Things just didn’t shake out the way Vought’s crew had hoped this time.

One curiosity is why the administration wouldn’t just try to go through Congress to rescind funding passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. After all, Republicans now control both the House and Senate. The White House might have a few reasons for wanting to do it on its own. First, legislation is slow, and Trump prefers to show results fast. Second, Republican margins are narrow, and although GOP elected officials and voters favor cuts in the abstract, they don’t always favor cuts to particular things that voters like, so the White House might struggle to get even the requisite simple majority to rescind some of the spending it tried to freeze this week. Third, impoundment per se is not the only goal—it’s also a means to the ideological end of seizing power for the executive branch.

In Project 2025, Vought laments that Congress has yielded too much power to the presidency. “The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people. This challenge is created and exacerbated by factors like Congress’s decades-long tendency to delegate its lawmaking power to agency bureaucracies,” he wrote. Paradoxically, his plan for limiting the executive branch is to give it more muscle.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

As if to prove Vought’s point about congressional deference, Speaker Mike Johnson has backed the White House thus far. Just a decade ago, conservatives were furious that then-President Barack Obama was using executive orders to do things that congressional Democrats had failed or declined to do. Now the use of much more radical executive orders is the first recourse of the Republican president.

Because this effort is core to the ideological agenda of Project 2025 principals such as Vought, the revocation of this executive order likely won’t be the last effort we see along these lines. And having to back down for political reasons tends to make the internal battles only fiercer. Trump’s attempts to decimate the civil service and clear out career bureaucrats are well known, but Project 2025’s authors reserved special animus for those whom they expected to be on their side during the first Trump administration.

“I had a front-row seat on many of these issues and importantly [saw] how bad thinking would end up preventing what we were trying to accomplish, from less-than-vigorous political appointees who refused to occupy the moral high ground, particularly in the first two years of the president's administration,” Vought said in a 2023 speech. He has no intention of letting that happen again.