Houston and Harris County on Tuesday were scrambling to figure out the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s pause on federal grants and aid, a move local officials said could hold up hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
The pause – and potential future elimination of federal money – could have far-reaching impacts on the city and county’s operating budgets and constituent services.
The White House memo directly mentions a pause on foreign aid and federal assistance to nonprofits while going further to pause programs including, but not limited to, “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal.” The pause is not meant to have a sweeping, across-the-board impact on federal programs, according to a second memo from the administration, but local officials said the directive is too vague.
Local governments in Houston and across the country worked against a 4 p.m. (Central Time) deadline Tuesday to identify what programs and services could be impacted.
“It is impossible to put into words how far-reaching this could be. There are so many programs that are partially or fully funded federally,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said. “This has the potential to freeze Harris County.”
Menefee said the pause could put some public housing initiatives, infrastructure projects and a $250 million grant for solar panels at risk. Earlier this month, the county received a $2 million federal grant to assess the safety of more than a dozen railroad crossings in the area following the death of a Milby High School student who was struck by a train on his way to school. That funding also could be at risk, the county attorney said.
Menefee said his office also got a letter and notification from the U.S. Department of Energy that said recipients had to “stop everything” under Trump’s order.
The city still is working to determine how much of its upcoming funding will be affected, officials from the mayor and controller’s offices said. With the upcoming budget already facing a $230 million shortfall, a pause or eventual elimination of federal funds to existing programs could have significant effects.
Harris County also is finalizing the potential financial impact but Menefee’s office described it as a “large portion” of the county’s budget.
Menefee said his office is considering what legal action to take and has consulted with at least one attorney general about partnering in litigation. At least seven state attorneys general, including those in New York and California, announced plans to file a lawsuit against Trump’s order. The National Council of Nonprofits already filed for a temporary restraining order Tuesday.
The original memo released by the federal Office of Management and Budget on Monday ordered the analysis of federal programs to ensure funds went toward the administration’s top priorities and were in line with a slew of executive orders released in the first days of Trump’s presidency.
Federal agencies have until Feb. 10 to provide reports to the office about the paused allocations. It is unclear when awards officially could be canceled.
There’s also the whole Medicaid shutdown thing, which I imagine will cause some heartburn in the state. Not that any of our leaders will complain, mind you – their knees are permanently bent. I say sue with abandon – the order is both typically vague, and very thoroughly illegal. One hopes we can at least get a quick resolution. The 19th has more.
UPDATE: The freeze is frozen, at least for now. I still say, sue baby sue.
UPDATE: From TPM:
As of late Tuesday evening the administration seems to be rolling out a series of “waivers”, “exceptions” and “oh that’s not what we meants” as they realize what is funded by grants and the bad news stories proliferate. PEPFAR is now in the clear under a new “if it makes people die” waiver.
There’s a growing list of similar examples.
The chaos is the point.
It’s said that you shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. In this case, we have extra large helpings of both.
This is what the (majority of the) peoples voted for, and what they’re getting.
Agree with Flypusher. The chaos is the point; I hope the incompetence will be its undoing.
Among other things, there is no such thing as “woke gender ideology”. It is the old ‘homosexual agenda’ trope reworked for a new century. This may not stop extremist right wing judges from twisting the law into knots trying to give fake constructs like ‘transgenderism’ and ‘green new deal social engineering’ legal validity.
For some reason the extreme right wing Bible college and propaganda center Hillsdale College sends me a newsletter from time to time; I got one last year that has the title article “Inside the Transgender Empire”. The first sentence is “The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere.” One of the subheadings is ‘The Synthesis of All Oppressions”. Yes it is the most amazing compendium of complete bullshit that I have ever read.
The problem is that the hard right Bible thumpers at Hillsdale don’t like trans people or their caregivers because they are supposed interfering with God’s creation, so they have to be stepped on hard, for purely religious reasons. The other problem is that many on the right believe all of this amazing bullshit which has been concocted in order to justify what is nothing more than naked religious oppression. As part of the process of obfuscation they have invented a whole new lexicon include such nonsense words and phrases as transgenderism, transgender agenda, transgender empire, and transgender movement.
In the end it is all just good old fashioned right wing religious hatred.
“The problem is that the hard right Bible thumpers at Hillsdale don’t like trans people or their caregivers because they are supposed interfering with God’s creation,”
By that logic they should also be against corrective surgery for cleft palates or twisted spines. And many other medical procedures.
I understand that invoking “logic” is futile here.
Notice that Hillsdale is portraying the supposed ‘transgenderists’ as the oppressors, when they are the real oppressors. Also they state that “the transgender movement is inherently political”, another diversion, as the Hillsdale propaganda mavens are the ones using politics to get their hard core religious doctrine enacted into law.
There is no such thing as the ‘transgender movement’.
This band of buffoons are thoroughly incapable of governing.