Letters from an American - February 10, 2025

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

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February 10th, 2025. As soon as President Donald Trump took office, his administration froze great swaths of government funding. Apparently to test the theory popular with Project 2025 authors that the 1974 law forbidding the president from impounding money Congress had appropriated was unconstitutional. The loss of funding has hurt Americans across the country. Today, Daniel Wu, Gaia Gupta, and Anumita Kaur of the Washington Post reported that farmers who had signed contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve infrastructure and who had paid up front to put in fences, plant

different crops, and install renewable energy systems with the promise the government would provide financial assistance are now left holding the bag. With Republicans in Congress largely mum about this and other power grabs by the administration, the courts are holding the line. Chief Judge John McConnell of the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island today found that the Trump administration has refused to disperse federal funding despite the court's clear and unambiguous temporary restraining order saying it must do so. McConnell said the administration must immediately restore frozen funding and clear

any hurdles to that funding until the court hears arguments about the case. This includes the monies withheld from the farmers. This evening, Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Angel Kelly blocked the Trump appointees at the National Institutes of Health from implementing the rate change they wanted to apply to NIH grants. But, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance notes, the only relief sought is for the 22 Democratic-led states that have sued, keeping Republican-dominated states from freeloading on their Democratic counterparts. As Josh Marshall noted today in Talking Points Memo, it appears a pattern is emerging in

which Democratic-led states are suing the administration while officials from Republican-led states, which are even harder hit by Trump's cuts than their Democratic-led counterparts, are asking Trump directly for help or exceptions. As soon as he took office, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who was a key author of Project 2025 and who is also acting as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced he was shuttering the agency. That closure was a recommendation of Project 2025, which called the Consumer Protection Agency a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits.

Immediately, the National Treasury Employees Union sued him saying that votes directive to employees to stop working reflects an unlawful attempt to thwart Congress's decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers. MAGA loyalists, particularly Vice President JD Vance, have begun to suggest they will not abide by the rule of law. But before Trump and Vance took office, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called out Vance's hints that he would be willing to defy the rulings of federal courts as dangerous suggestions that must be soundly rejected.

Today, the American Bar Association took a stand against the Trump administration's wide scale affronts to the rule of law itself, as it attacks the constitution and tries to dismantle departments and agencies created by Congress, without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law.

The American Bar Association supports the rule of law, President of the organization William R. Bay said in a statement. That means holding governments, including our own, accountable. He cheered on the courts that are treating these cases with the urgency they require. Refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress under the euphemism of a pause is a violation of the rule of law and suggests that the executive branch can overrule the other two co-equal branches of government, Bay wrote.

This is contrary to the constitutional framework and not the way our democracy works. The money appropriated by Congress must be spent in accordance with what Congress has said. It cannot be changed or paused because a newly elected administration desires it. Our elected representatives know this. The lawyers of this country know this. It must stop. He called on elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law.

The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. They are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent. We urge every attorney to join us and insist that our government, a government of the people, follow the law. Today, five former Treasury Secretaries wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that also reinforced the legal lines of our constitutional system, warning that our democracy is under siege.

Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton, Timothy F. Geithner and Jacob J. Lew, who served under President Barack Obama, and Janet L. Yellen, who served under President Joe Biden, spoke up about the violation of the United States Treasury's nonpartisan payment system by political actors working in Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. That doggy team lack training and experience to handle private personal data, they note,

like social security numbers and bank account information. Their involvement risks exposing highly sensitive information and even risks the failure of critical infrastructure as they muck around with computer codes. The former Treasury Secretaries noted that on Saturday morning, a federal judge had temporarily stopped those doggie workers from accessing the department's payment and data systems, warning that that access could cause irreparable harm. While significant data privacy, cybersecurity, and national security threats are gravely concerning, the former secretaries wrote.

The constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming. The executive branch must respect that Congress controls the nation's money, they wrote, reiterating the key principle outlined in the Constitution. The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent. The Treasury Department cannot decide which promises of federal funding made by Congress

it will keep and which it will not, the letter read. The Trump Administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside. That warning appears as Trump indicates that he is willing to undermine the credit of the United States. Yesterday on Air Force One, he told reporters that the members of the administration trying

to find wasteful spending have suggested that they have found fraud in Treasury bonds and that the US might have less debt than we thought. The suggestion that the US might not honor its debt is a direct attack on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which says that the validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. That amendment was written under similar circumstances when former Confederates sought to avoid debt payments and undermine the power of the

federal government. Lauren Thomas, Ben Drummett, and Chip Cutter of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that for CEOs and bankers, the Trump euphoria is fading fast. Consumers are losing confidence in the economy and observers expect inflation, while business leaders find that trying to navigate Trump's on-again, off-again tariffs is taking all their attention. Meanwhile, Trump has continued his purge of government employees he considers insufficiently loyal to him. On Friday, he tried to get rid of Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Elections Commission, who contended that her removal was illegal.

He also fired Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, head of the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, the government agency that handles presidential records. The Archivist is the official responsible for receiving and validating the certified electoral ballots for presidential elections, a process Trump's people tried to corrupt after he lost the 2020 presidential election. It was NARA that first discovered case of the retained classified documents today, when U.S. District Judge Barrell Howell ruled that the FBI must search its records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from journalist Jason Leopold,

after Leopold learned that Trump had allegedly flushed presidential records down the toilet when he was president, and later brought classified documents to Florida. The judge noted that the Supreme Court ruling in Trump vs. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties and is at least presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility, means that there is no reason to hold back information to shield him from prosecution. Indeed, Howell notes, that decision means that the Freedom of Information Act request

is now the only way for the American public to know what its government is up to. Howell highlighted that the three Supreme Court justices who dissented from the Trump vs. United States decision described it as making a mockery of the principle foundational to our constitution and system of government that no man is above the law. In a footnote, Howell also called attention to the fact that presumptive immunity for the president does not extend to those who aid, abet, and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president. The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of just following orders has long been rejected in this country's jurisprudence. Today, Trump fired David Huidema, Director of the Office of Government Ethics, the department

that oversees political appointments and helps nominees avoid conflicts of interest. On Friday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. That office enforces federal whistleblower laws, as well as the law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity, the Hatch Act. Congress provided that the special counsel can be removed only for insufficiency,

neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, and today Dellinger sued, calling his removal illegal. Tonight, Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked Dellinger's firing through Thursday as she hears arguments in the case. ["Soundscape"] Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.