To many statehouse types, some of last week’s news out of Washington felt eerily familiar.
Last Monday night, 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.
Congress, not the president, controls spending
The president didn’t actually need to halt a dime of funding to examine these programs for ideological conformance, of course. He could’ve just, you know, had his people look at them, which gives you a big clue that this action was much more than just 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, by late afternoon a federal judge paused the cuts until a temporary restraining order hearing could be held on Monday.
Again, the Rauner specter re-emerges. 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 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 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. 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).
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.
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