Trump White House orders freeze on federal grants, loans | Hacker News Reader

Trump White House orders freeze on federal grants, loans

rollcall.com

60 pointsj2bax13 comments

I can't wait to be told this is entirely political and a halt on $3 trillion of grants, many of which go to university research programs and (open source) nonprofits isn't "technical news" and won't prompt "valuable discussion". I'm sure a sudden double digit plummet in the entire spending of the US government won't have any affect on our lives or careers.

And that's not even getting into that this is, by an ocean, the largest case of illegal executive impounding this nation has ever seen, with downright insane, Orwellian language used as justification and very little actual clarification as to what it actually means. For instance, are Pell grants included? They're for individuals but dispersed by universities. Medicare is safeguarded, but Medicaid?

Just fantastic. Slide and slide.

Over twenty million people are expected to have their HIV viral loads return to pretreatment levels again in a few weeks now that the PEPFAR program is suspended.

Don't worry, the main discussion thread on this has been flagged and Dang will let it rot because it doesn't serve Paul Graham's agenda. Now we don't have to deal with such uncomfortable topics!

And will Congresspeople point out that they legislated the funds to go where the laws they passed dictate?

Is it actually clear this is an authority the president has? Basically usurping Congress' control of the purse?

It's clear that this is an authority that the president does not possess. The President does not have unilateral authority to impound funds. Congress has the power of the purse.

It's clear, but political power only exists if it's used. If congress grants this power to the executive, they render themselves all but irrelevant. They'd be a rather expensive and unattractive claque.

In office you wield some clout on the world and get excellent stock tips. They are mildly expensive and mostly unattractive already.

No, its clear that it is authority the President does not have under the Constitution, and even when Congress tried to give the President a small fraction of this power in the 1996 Line Item Veto Act, that Act itself was found to be unconstitutional: its power the President doesn't have under the Constitution and could not Constitutionally be given.

Apparently he can for a short period, yes, according to MSM.

I think their phrasing is only "if everyone relevant goes along with it."

Does this mean SBA loan origination in recent hurricane and wildfire areas is suspended?

Not a good time to be a federally funded research and development corporation (NASA JPL, Fermi National Accelerator, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, NCAR, Oak Ridge, SLAC, etc)

Yes.

It also appears to pause Medicaid funding. That impacts 85M people and half of all childbirths.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/donald-trump/2025/01/2...

> Although the White House in a memo stated that Medicare and Medicaid would not be affected by the freeze, Illinois on Tuesday reported that state agencies could not access federal funding sites that included Medicaid.

> State agencies started reporting issues to Gov. JB Pritzker’s office Tuesday morning with accessing federal funding sites and disbursement systems, including Medicaid systems, his office said. Pritzker has been in communication with the state’s federal delegation, local elected officials, nonprofits and other governors about the matter.

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