- Apr 3, 2003
- 26,041
- 11,382
- 76
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Libertarian
Slow-walking or flat-out disobeying Trump’s fleeting obsessions has become common practice across various sectors of government.
On March 29, during a weekend jaunt to Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump announced a major policy decision that surprised top-ranking officials in several government agencies. The United States was cutting off aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the president said. Never mind that Trump lacked the authority to unilaterally scrap and redirect the funds in question; his decision was sure to please supporters such as the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who had previously argued that one of the only ways to stop the “border crush” is to threaten a “foreign aid cut-off.”
Stunned State Department officials hurried to put together a statement that evening. The letter promised to “[carry] out the president’s direction and [end] FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle. We will be engaging Congress as part of this process.” A similar situation played out in January 2017, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection was sent into a frenzy trying to implement Trump’s Muslim ban seven days after he took office.
A month and a half has passed since the president’s Central America announcement, and according to lawmakers and aides, the administration is not advancing the issue. Senator Patrick Leahy, who serves as the ranking member of the subcommittee that funds foreign aid, told me that this was the inevitable result of an “impulsive and illogical” decision by the president. “It caught the State Department and USAID by surprise, and they have been scrambling to figure out how to limit the damage it would cause,” Leahy said.
“We have heard nothing so far,” a senior Democratic official on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which must sign off on any funds that State wants to reallocate, told me. “What money are we talking about? For what purposes? What’s the timeline for this? It’s been weeks now, and we’ve asked multiple times, and we know nothing.” (A State Department spokesperson told me the department is still undergoing a “review of all Department of State and USAID FY 2017 foreign assistance funding on current agreements and awards” in order “to provide detailed data to the Secretary to determine the best way forward pursuant to the President’s direction.”)
...
Beyond finding some way to make these pronouncements happen, or gently push back on them, government officials have a third, if rarer and riskier, approach: Ignore the president’s directives altogether. “If it was a tweet that could conceivably be about another agency, normally those things would just kind of be policy pronouncements that would steer toward—not a slow death, necessarily, but a general opinion of the president,” a former White House official told me. “We felt like we could kind of sit quietly on those.”
...
As one of the former White House officials put it to me, Trump’s fitful orders are more about “venting” and “public messaging” than goal-setting. “Although he wishes the ‘demands’ would come true,” the source explained, “that’s secondary and perhaps not even expected.”
...
“Whether Trump even cares about this in six months, who knows,” said the Senate Appropriations Committee senior official, about the Central American funding debacle. “But we’re the ones that have to try and fix it.”
On March 29, during a weekend jaunt to Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump announced a major policy decision that surprised top-ranking officials in several government agencies. The United States was cutting off aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the president said. Never mind that Trump lacked the authority to unilaterally scrap and redirect the funds in question; his decision was sure to please supporters such as the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who had previously argued that one of the only ways to stop the “border crush” is to threaten a “foreign aid cut-off.”
Stunned State Department officials hurried to put together a statement that evening. The letter promised to “[carry] out the president’s direction and [end] FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle. We will be engaging Congress as part of this process.” A similar situation played out in January 2017, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection was sent into a frenzy trying to implement Trump’s Muslim ban seven days after he took office.
A month and a half has passed since the president’s Central America announcement, and according to lawmakers and aides, the administration is not advancing the issue. Senator Patrick Leahy, who serves as the ranking member of the subcommittee that funds foreign aid, told me that this was the inevitable result of an “impulsive and illogical” decision by the president. “It caught the State Department and USAID by surprise, and they have been scrambling to figure out how to limit the damage it would cause,” Leahy said.
“We have heard nothing so far,” a senior Democratic official on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which must sign off on any funds that State wants to reallocate, told me. “What money are we talking about? For what purposes? What’s the timeline for this? It’s been weeks now, and we’ve asked multiple times, and we know nothing.” (A State Department spokesperson told me the department is still undergoing a “review of all Department of State and USAID FY 2017 foreign assistance funding on current agreements and awards” in order “to provide detailed data to the Secretary to determine the best way forward pursuant to the President’s direction.”)
...
Beyond finding some way to make these pronouncements happen, or gently push back on them, government officials have a third, if rarer and riskier, approach: Ignore the president’s directives altogether. “If it was a tweet that could conceivably be about another agency, normally those things would just kind of be policy pronouncements that would steer toward—not a slow death, necessarily, but a general opinion of the president,” a former White House official told me. “We felt like we could kind of sit quietly on those.”
...
As one of the former White House officials put it to me, Trump’s fitful orders are more about “venting” and “public messaging” than goal-setting. “Although he wishes the ‘demands’ would come true,” the source explained, “that’s secondary and perhaps not even expected.”
...
“Whether Trump even cares about this in six months, who knows,” said the Senate Appropriations Committee senior official, about the Central American funding debacle. “But we’re the ones that have to try and fix it.”
