Feds attempt to block trillions in government spending

To many Statehouse types, some of last week’s news out of
Washington, D.C., felt eerily familiar.

On Jan. 27, the White House announced a sweeping new
policy that would’ve at least temporarily defunded trillions of dollars of
government spending on everything from the National School Lunch Program, to
Head Start, to cancer and sleep disorders research, and on and on through 50
small-print pages.

So, some Illinoisans rightly pointed out that former
Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner also tried crashing government spending by defunding
vital social services and other programs.

But what the White House attempted last week differed
from Rauner’s misrule in a very big way: Rauner thought he could use massive
funding cuts resulting from a budget impasse as “leverage” (his word) to force
Democrats to break their ties with labor unions.

The Trump administration offered no such grand bargain.
Instead, they ordered the complete funding cut-off of some 2,000 government
grants and programs until they could be assured that none of them conflicted
with their ideological demands, including “diversity, equity, inclusion and
accessibility,” “gender ideology,” etc., all with the end result of “ending
‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government,” according to a memo issued by
the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, Matthew Vaeth. The
examination process had no stated end date, so some or even most of those
programs could’ve been suspended indefinitely.

As we learned during the Rauner years, providers
typically have very little cash on hand, and that’s mostly by design. The
federal government, for instance, doesn’t just hand out a year’s worth of
funding to some small social service group. The providers get their money in
small bites, often around payroll dates. So, even a two-week funding halt could
seriously harm many of these organizations.

The president didn’t actually need to halt a dime of
funding to examine these programs for ideological conformance, of course. He
could have just had his people look at them, which gives you a big clue that
this action was much more than some limited “anti-woke” ideological policing
(along with the mysterious and highly suspect cut-off of certain states’ access
to the Medicaid computer portal).

Opponents of the order rightly pointed out that Congress
long ago passed a law protecting its strong constitutional appropriations
powers by mandating the executive to spend the money it appropriates, with very
limited exceptions. And a federal judge paused the cuts until a temporary
restraining order hearing could be held.

Again, the Rauner specter reemerges. The courts back then
forced the state of Illinois to pay its employees and fund certain vital
programs even without a budget. So, the state limped along for two years while
non-Medicaid human service providers, contractors and others slowly died on the
vine. The horror (state funding for things like a program to help teenage rape
survivors was eliminated) finally ended 793 days after it began, when
Republicans joined Democrats to increase taxes and pass a budget over Rauner’s
vetoes.

The White House withdrew the order, but then the White
House press secretary insisted that the cuts would still happen even without
the directive. Another lawsuit, filed by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul
and several colleagues from across the country, began to move forward.

That process came to a head on Friday when a federal
judge issued a sweeping temporary restraining order blocking the Trump
administration from doing anything that could reduce spending already approved
by Congress. Judge John J. McConnell even quoted a ruling that Trump-appointed
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh handed down when he was a circuit
court judge: “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse
to spend the funds.”

The state could similarly be in for years of court fights
over this current federal spending battle, and likely more in the future,
while, as under Rauner, the institutions and people down below try to survive.

There’s no way that this state government can adequately
plan for what might happen next because nobody knows what will happen next. I
mean, who could’ve predicted perhaps the most aggressive challenge ever to the
U.S. Congress’ constitutional appropriations powers would be launched last
week?

Really, the only thing the state can do now is to be even
more prudent with its budgeting. President Trump wants to cut programs that
deviate from his ideology. If he can convince Congress to go along, a judge
won’t be able to step in. He could also try another way to get around the
court’s mandate – and the U.S. Constitution.

This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2025.