White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion. TRILLIONS of dollars could be on hold, according to an Office of Management and Budget memo.

the american Century of Humiliation has begun

the document says programs affected are “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Dear lord. Forget drinking it, these people drowned in the koolaid.

When you're so obsessed with your brainwormed culture wars that it leads you to your own destruction.
Accelerationists are gonna be so smug when the USA becomes a smoking heap of shit by the end of the year with this pace
you recognise the bodies in the coolaid
Conservatives went from understanding how to manipulate public perception of issues and their causes in order to alter the structure of the country however they wanted, to having their chairs filled by those they hoodwinked decades ago
I hope Nixon and Kissinger are watching this from Hell while screaming

people have been saying Milei is Argentina's Trump but I think we forget that Trump is America's Milei

So he's gonna destroy the economy, but still have a 50% approval rating a year later
We probably should be looking closer at Argentina's fallout to glean what we can actually expect. Starting to feel like Argentina was the beta-test for this similar to Chile with western neoliberal projects.
Neoliberalism may be going the way of Keynesian economics.
- With the added fun of ... this will cause a global economic depression on par with the Great Depression, as US consumption drives a huge amount of other country's exports, and US financial capital is so intertwined with everything.
  Thats all gonna go up in smoke, so... contagion!
  Hooray!

I didn't realize shock therapy would be done in the dumbest way possible

I’m not trying to scare you, but all of you need to understand that no matter where you live right now, your job/career is literally hanging on whether Elon Musk gets to cut two trillion from the US federal budget or not.

If Elon gets his way, the US goes into recession. Millions will lose their jobs, and this will spiral to all the other sectors and send shockwaves across the world. Think 2009 GFC - there is not a country that will not be affected by it. Many more will lose their jobs, homes, savings as the economic prospect trends down, especially the export countries.

Crazy that whether I get to keep my job over the next few years or not is literally going to be decided by what Elon Musk gets to do. If you told me this even a year ago I would have laughed at you so hard.

And people still have an undying devotion to this system
Musk is not smart enough to make some of these decisions on his own, and I mean that very seriously. He has the emotional immaturity of a teenager and repeatedly proves it time and time again which puts everyone in danger (goes without saying).
To make matters worse, he’s the richest person in the world so there is no one to hold him accountable. Still has too many people thinking he’s Tony stark, inventing cars and rockets himself and believing he’s self-made. It’s hard to believe this is reality sometimes.
"I'm not trying to scare you" Yeah but
this will spiral to all the other sectors and send shockwaves across the world. Think 2009 GFC - there is not a country that will not be affected by it.
As bad as all this is, I'm still getting out the popcorn if Trump goes through with allowing Musk to cut all of that

I'm not in the US but one of my fav comments over this on another app said well if they're going to freeze our tax money like this and stop distributing it to social programs and so on, why are we paying our taxes?

It's a good point. A widespread tax strike would fuck this administration up.

While the dollar hegemony remains, unfortunately the US government can literally just print more money and be fine for a while.
Granted that's probably going to implode too if this kind of shit keeps up.
- I think they're pissing off enough international heads of state that all it would take is a bunch of the largest to recall their debts and it would sink that strat pretty fucking quick. Tariff wars won't be kind to the US. I don't know what they think they have of value in this case. Moviefilms? The tech companies?
- That would be absolutely hilarious if all this results in Trump implicitly arguing that MMT is real.
If you are a worker, income taxes are deducted already, right? You don't have a choice. And you don't have the choice to not be paid in Dollars, all the corps only accept dollars.
And in the US there is a ton of private debt (mortgage, healthcare, student loan debt) all help with demand for Dollars.
For the Sovereign (US Federal Government), taxes are one way to create demand for Dollars which they make (first) and allow banks to make.
Not likely with regards to individuals, but I could see state and local governments withholding tax dollars taken out of public employees’ checks from going to the feds.
- That would be sick
- For sure, regional departments could do it. It would take a lot for individuals to get on board but it has happened before. Also I read from a fairly credible source that the *UAW is already working to organize a general strike for 2028 (wish it was sooner) as a way to push OrangeMeng out of office if it comes to that. I haven't verified but fuck I hope so.

Please engrave "ha ha hee hee" on my gravestone but make it look like the dates so it reads "born: ha ha, died: hee hee"

Born to ha, forced to hee
"born: ha ha, died: hee hee"
That joke should have been made in a movie or a tv show a long time ago. I'm imagining some obscure 1980s zombie movie and two of the leads are in a graveyard.
"Look! 'Born: ha ha. Died: hee hee.' "
"What?"
"On the tombstone."
"I'm not in the mood for—"
"Look!"
He looks. "I'll be fucking damned."
"I don't think you should have said that in a graveyard."
"I'll be fucking damned. It's gonna be dark soon. We gotta find shelter." Five minutes of screen time later - he's killed by a pack of zombies ripping him to shreds.

I'm at a loss of words. I seriously wonder what this is supposed to achieve. Death to Amerikkka.

inflicting grave wounds on the us economy to root out woke research
My take - https://hexbear.net/comment/5861939
The privatization of institutions at rock bottom prices.
I'm imagining this is largely Elons idea. He did the same with twitter after all. Doofuses like him are obsessed with making things "more efficient" which somehow always translates to cutting funding

So this is what being trapped in the machine as the machine bleeds to death feels like.

If it bleeds, we can kill it
- Where’s piety when we need her

It's the top of the hour right now - and neither CNN nor MSNBC is covering this totally insane and astronomical Trump power grab. I shouldn't be shocked but holy fuck.

I've only watched little of CNN and MSNBC but it seems like their function is to soften everything Trump does to avoid public panic
- And WaPo, the NYT, etc too. By tomorrow there will any number of horrible "Who's winning - Trump or the dems?" op-eds or opinion pieces in newspapers, on websites (like MSNBC), Substack articles, etc. It's like the media showing up after a building is set on fire by an arsonist and asking "Gee, who's winning? The arsonist?"

including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal

what green new deal?! who the fuck is doing the green new deal right now? "hello please direct me to your green new deal adherence offices"

the green new deal is when I go to Home Depot and they have battery powered mowers on the shelves instead of God-fearing, gas powered gas mowers like Briggs & Stratton!
they still have gas mowers, but, as a red-blooded and wife-breeding Christian man, I should not even have to see these woke electrical gizmos that my stolen taxes paid for.
in a similar vein, Trump's gotta reimburse all police forces for the massive budget cuts (that never actually happened)

I think this is a mafioso style shakedown. Trump is the don and he's telling the owner of a notable business in the state, Mr. Dems, that a large portion of Mr. Dems' profits need to go to him immediately.

Mr. Dems says "Look, Don Trump, right now I can give you - I don't know the numbers - half of one percent but—"

And Trump says "What? Half of one percent? Listen you worthless fuck. You give me half starting right now or I burn it all down. With you and your family in it."

And - of course - Mr. Dems pays up.

--

In real life - I can imagine the dems quickly acquiesce "for the good of the country" to stop the widespread panic and to stop the chaos and they give Trump - I dunno - $300 billion for his racist deportation program. And Chuck Schumer puts up an weirdly oddly upbeat tweet that the dems talked Trump down from a half a trillion so everything isn't a total loss.

[Edit - I used much better numbers.]

When this piece of shit and apartheid clyde aren't whining about race mixing they're fucking things up for everyone. And this isn't even gonna be the worst part. People really voted him twice

Country of over 300 mill and this is the best admin you can come up with

we just started this week what's gonna happen friday? trump and musk having a televised fist fight?

trump and musk having a televised fist fight?
Even better would be [redacted].

It's a two page memo that goes into effect tomorrow and it's causing "widespread panic".

In a two-page document, Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, instructs federal agencies to "temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance." [...] The memo goes into effect Tuesday.
[...]
Donald Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said the language in the memo is confusing, making its specific effects unclear. There will be widespread panic, Kettl said, as state and local governments as well as the people most reliant on federal-funded grants scramble to figure out if and when their cash flow will stop.

Look at this milquetoast shit when trillions are on the line...

"They say this is only temporary, but no one should believe that," Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement. "Donald Trump must direct his Administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers' money should be distributed to the people. Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law."

--

THERE IS NO GREEN NEW DEAL. THAT HASNT BEEN PASSED. ARGGGGHH
- Trump smiles and yells "THERE IS NO GREEN NEW DEAL. THAT HASN'T PASSED SO NO GREEN NEW DEAL." For some reason he sounds like a pirate for a second - "ARGGGGHH." - then he goes back to normal and says "NO GREEN NEW DEAL. NONE. THAT MONEY IS FOR DEPORT PROGRAM AND GREENLAND WAR..."
Found this on another thread. If it's real it shows that the OPM memo (and a few others) was composed by folks from Heritage Foundation/Project 2025. They didn't scrub the fucking meta data off the PDFs before sending them out. Sources and archived copies of the docs linked from this article. https://www.citationneeded.news/trumps-project-2025-ghostwriters/
- WaPo didn't have the metadata stuff. God fuck o'mighty - legacy media is fucking awful. And thank god for Citations Needed.
- They didn't scrub the fucking meta data off the PDFs before sending them out.
  In my mind's eye I saw each member of Trump's inner circle of top guys finding a lightsaber. And each of them kills themselves a slightly different way by slicing off large chunks of their bodies when they turn them on. I wanted to make a "The Force" joke but the wacky part of my brain took control and my joke went in a different direction.

Guess its time to embrace your inner accelerationist.

You all laugh but now I have to shut down my woke gender ideology factory, and cold starting that equipment is slow and expensive. We are headed for a nationwide woke shortage.

i'm not USian, what is the actual practical effects of this likely to be? who does this hurt?

There must be millions of Americans who have jobs that are at least partially funded by the government, but aren't directly working for the federal government. It may also apply to literally every employee of a state government that relies on federal grants. It's highly, highly illegal to do what he's doing. Not to mention the people who rely on the services those workers provide. Healthcare, case management, funding for food assistance, the way it's worded, there is no industry that doesn't touch.
All currently ongoing medical and scientific studies will grind to a halt. Possibly subsidies to industries that have lobbied for those. It's just a truly mind-bogglingly large change. 3 trillion dollars per year. Arts grants. ~~Maybe federal student loan disbursements?~~ Those would be exempt because they go to individuals, I guess?
There are people whose full-time job is grant writing, which means applying for grants from the government for their non-profit organizations.
The other problem is it's very vague.
- jesus fucking christ.
  it astounds me that the forces of capital are allowing him to do half the shit he's pulled this week. he's planting landmines under every inch of the US economy and they're just fucking letting him?? i know party discipline doesn't really exist in the US but i thought the bourgeoisie filled that void (both as private actors and through shit like the CIA)
- Nah it can’t be any of that stuff, it says they’re just getting rid of the woke stuff!
- not sure how it's gonna go exactly, but there is some resiliency built into systems where the state / organization reliant on the federal grant is operating in good faith.
  while federal grants fund all sorts of activities actually provided by state governments, those state governments basically front the money for salary and materials based on the agreement, then yearly bill the feds via reporting and invoicing.
  so what this really is, in my analysis, is a signal to bad faith actors in state governments to come down hard on federally funded projects by insisting the bill won't be paid in the future, so they need to furlough state workers on whatever federally funded projects they don't want to happen.
  so you'll have some states that will continue to do the work and then bill the feds and take them to court if they don't pay, because the agreement to pay (the grant award) is a legal contract. and you'll have some states that let some local politicians take a wrecking ball to the place and gut whatever capacity they feel like targeting.
  this move is basically trump giving the statehouse jackals some free shots to fuck with state government.
- Does this also include agriculture? Are the farmers gonna stop receiving subsidies?
who does this hurt?
Most public scientific research institutions (and those carrying out or otherwise supporting the research at all levels)
Hromadske (Ukrainian pro-Western media) is already crying that they stopped getting money from USAID and is begging for donations, so there is a silver lining.

I realized I missed something obvious. If Trump gets away with this - it'll surely end basic programs people need to simply survive like food stamps.

Trump gonna get himself assassinated

Serious question - Has Bernie said a single thing about this? If so - what?

Tonight I know Bernie tweeted cute comments about Greenland's healthcare system and it's government. But this is a bit more important. Trump - that fucker - has been in office just a week and we are in a constitutional crisis of biblical proportions. God, how fucked are we?

Apart from what he's said like a month ago about the budget omnibus bill in December, it doesn't look like it as far as I can tell
- He's been uploading a lot on youtube recently, I haven't been watching though cause fuck him

This reeks of Elon

Gonna be an interesting day at work...

Same here.
- Update from above: Continue working and pretend everything is ok.

This seems to be the top Bluesky thread right now - https://subium.com/profile/mjsdc.bsky.social/post/3lgrizlvbu227

There was an announcement in our morning meeting today, since the company's entire business model depends on government grants. Company president is an ardent Trump supporter.

Leopards... Faces....
--
Yes, I know - I belong in the Hexbear penalty box for a few minutes. It's a lib joke. But I had to make it anyway. I had to.
- I hear ya. At least you're not jacking off over the thought of genocide+.

Panem et circenses, but the bread machine's broke

Things are about to get much more efficient lol