The freeze is still on, at least in some places. Republicans have learned that the courts have no power to top anything, not even a blatantly criminal president who stole classified documents and refused to give them back. So issuing a “restraining order” is a nice symbolic act but I’m not sure anyone thinks it means much anymore. Once you take a wrecking ball to every norm and law in the country you end up standing on the courthouse steps saying “Yeah? You and what army?” and the whole thing falls apart.
One week after the Trump administration ordered a pause on federal grants and loans, many Head Start programs in Wisconsin are still unable to access needed funds and are facing uncertainty about whether they can stay open.
While the White House publicly rescinded the memo announcing the freeze, nonprofit organizations around the state are reporting they remain locked out of the payment systems that they use to pay staff and keep operations running.
“I’m hearing from people all across the country and here in Wisconsin that they’re still impacted by the freeze,” Shawn Phetteplace told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “There’s a lot of confusion about this right now, but if you talk to Head Starts, if you talk to child care providers … they’re still frozen out, and they can’t access the funds.”
There’s always the possibility that Musk and his little page boys have decided that a restraining order against the OMB freeze doesn’t apply to the payment system which they apparently now control?
Tim Nolan, who runs the program, told “Wisconsin Today” he received a notice from the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, last Monday, directing the center to shut down by the end of the day on Tuesday.
“When OMB asks, you do it,” he said. “So we did as we were told to do on Tuesday, which was shut down.”
Later, when he followed up about the status of the funding freeze, Nolan was told programs like Head Start and Meals on Wheels would not be affected. But since then, he said the payment management system of the U.S. Treasury, which he uses to request funds for things like rent and payroll, has not been working.
While funding requests normally take only two to three days to process, Nolan said a request he made last Tuesday is still “pending review.” And unless the issues with the payment management system are resolved quickly, he won’t be able to pay his staff on time.
Feature, not bug I’m guessing although it’s always possible that they’ve just fucked something up.
It seems to me that it’s pretty important that the word goes forth that this stuff is happening because of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. To the extent people are talking about it is it penetrating or do most people just think this is all a bunch of white noise at best and as sign of Trump and Musk’s awesome power to destroy the status quo so we can all get rich at worst? I suspect there’s more of the latter than we like to think. If you look at the right wing media and the alternative media that people seem to rely on like Joe Rogan, they are very, very stoked about Musk taking over the government and making as many federal workers suffer as humanly possible.