Seven Days to a Constitutional Crisis

Welcome to Project 2025. Even those who anticipated a much different second Trump term could hardly have predicted the scope and speed at which his administration would dismantle the apparatus of the federal government, executive order by executive order.

Trump set the tone for the week early when he issued a complete pardon to nearly all 1500 January 6 defendants, including those who assaulted police officers. With virtually no pushback from Congress, it’s hard to see this getting further litigated in the court of public opinion.

Included in Trump’s slate of executive orders were a series of actions taken to curtail immigration, even – maybe even especially – legal immigration. Most controversial is his attempt to revoke the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The administration also wasted no time halting the processing of immigration appointments made through the CBP One app, which stopped working minutes after Trump was sworn into office, affecting some 30,000 migrants.

Many of those with a CBP One appointment had waited for months, hoping to go through official, legal pathways to cross into the United States at a port of entry, obtain humanitarian parole and apply for asylum. In his inauguration address, Trump said he would declare a national emergency at the border and institute a policy requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims are reviewed. -The Washington Post

Days into the new administration, the White House was touting the deportations already underway.

Additionally, the administration canceled the flights of refugees who had already been cleared for resettlement in the United States, and is attempting to deny migrants the opportunity to even apply for asylum.

On top of the personal devastation these new acts are already inflicting on migrants and their families, they also spell bad news for those waiting for the price of groceries to go down.

Like the bullies that cower in the face of being called out on their actions, Donald Trump and fellow Republicans flipped out when Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde called on Trump to act compassionately towards minorities.

In other news, DEI is officially DOA. Somebody call up the men of Sterling Cooper because we’re doing racism, sexism, and homophobia in the workplace again. The Trump Administration has made clear that it is aggressively going after any initiative it perceives to be pertaining to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the federal government, threatening to punish even those employees who do not report DEI initiatives in their agency. Republicans in and out of government rejoiced.

A somewhat muted response from those on the left speaks to Democrats’ uncertainty in how to promote progressive identity-based ideas in the wake of their loss in November.

In Trump’s United States, we have – to paraphrase MLK – Two (corporate) Americas:

McCarthyism aside, it’s been a week of sweeping changes both real and threatened within federal agencies, leading to mass chaos and fears surrounding the immediate harms. The shock and awe culminated (for now? this statement is probably already woefully obsolete) in an order on Monday night that takes the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

Foreshadowing Executive Orders to come, the administration called for an immediate halt to all “external communication” from the Department of Health & Human Services, an order that includes peer review and medical trials in its purview.

Health officials and experts said this week they are reeling after the new Trump administration on Tuesday abruptly halted external communication at the Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The pause extends through Feb. 1, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post. The Trump administration also issued a second order indefinitely halting the travel of HHS personnel, according to a second memo obtained by The Post. –The Washington Post

Speculation aside, with the country increasingly at risk of a bird flu epidemic, this move paired with our exit from the World Health Organization bodes very poorly for any sort of inter-agency response.

Meanwhile, with the recovery in Southern California just barely underway, Trump is flirting with conditioning disaster relief on states’ politics, and even abandoning FEMA altogether.

Not content to wreak havoc within our borders, the administration is making waves overseas we well. The White House placed a 90-day Stop Work Order on all foreign assistance (excepting some emergency food assistance and military aid to Egypt and Israel), sowing chaos within the State Department and USAID.

The new guidance means no further actions will be taken to disperse aid funding to programs already approved by the U.S. government, according to three current and two former officials familiar with the new guidance.

The order shocked some department officials for its sweeping mandate. “State just totally went nuclear on foreign assistance,” said another State Department official. –POLITICO

In other foreign policy news, Trump continues to antagonize our allies, moving forward with plans to annex Greenland (?), nearly starting a new trade war with Colombia when the country’s president refused to accept repatriation flights using military planes, and placing tariffs on critical imports from Taiwan.

At least with Pete Hegseth confirmed as Department of Defense – over the objections of Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Lisa Murkowski – you can sleep easy knowing the largest military in the world is in sober hands.

But Trump turned the dial all the way up to 11 on Monday night, when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which produces the federal budget and coordinates inter-agency initiatives, directed a temporary “pause” on all funds distributed by Congress, with exceptions for Social Security and funds paid “directly to individuals,” though it’s unclear what this entails. Much like the orders to HHS and USAID (which themselves were further codified in this memo), this announcement threw much of the federal government into an immediate state of disorder.

So what is impoundment?

The question of whether a President can refuse to spend—to “impound”—funds Congress has appropriated for a designated purpose is one that has come up every so often in American history, albeit not on this scale. Sometimes, Congress passes statutes that give at least some spending discretion to the President. But absent such authorization, the prevailing consensus has long been that Congress’s power of the purse (the Spending Clause is the very first enumerated regulatory power that the Constitution confers upon the legislature) brings with it broad power to specify the purposes for which appropriated funds are to be spent—and that a broad presidential impoundment power would be inconsistent with that constitutional authority. If the President can accomplish Congress’s intended goal by spending less money, that’s one thing. But simply refusing to spend the appropriated funds because the President is opposed to why Congress appropriated the money in the first place is something else, altogether. –One First

In a healthy republic, Congressional leaders on both parties would be decrying the usurpation of their constitutionally mandated power. But we all know that that’s not gonna happen.

So where is the Democratic Party in all this?

It’s almost like rule by gerontocracy hinders Democrats from launching a full-throated response.

(In fairness to Democrats, this press conference has since pivoted to the topic of Monday night’s OMB order.)

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Cameron Scherer