Trump’s Done a Lot the Last 11 Days. Lowering Costs Isn’t High on the Agenda.

What a week presidential term, huh? Lemon, it’s Wednesday 11 days in.

In his inaugural address, President Donald Trump vowed to restore safety, reclaim sovereignty, and rebalance the scales of justice. He directed his cabinet to “marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.” He promised to overhaul our trade system “to protect American workers and families.” And, perhaps most critically, to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico.

We’re just about two weeks into the president’s second term. The carton of eggs I bought at the grocery store today was $6. Google Maps doesn’t say Gulf of America. All the chickens have the flu. The Trump meme coin is down more than 50 percent. But the president, in part thanks to his billionaire sidekick, got quite a bit done these past few days.

He started—and ended—a trade war with Colombia after the country turned away a military plane filled with deported migrants and Trump threatened to impose 25 percent retaliatory tariffs on imports from the country. He’s expected to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico tomorrow, though he promised Canada an exemption (and better health care) if they became the 51st state. He paused PEPFAR, a $6.5 billion program—and one of President George W. Bush’s crowning achievements—that distributes lifesaving HIV medication to 20 million people in 55 countries, ensuring these patients can’t access treatments. He instituted a hiring freeze across the federal government. And following in the footsteps of his takeover of Twitter, Trump’s accomplice Elon Musk helped him execute a plan to offer a “buyout” to 2.3 million career federal employees. (The heads of independent worker protection agencies weren’t given the severance offer and instead just got the boot.)

Trump reinstated the death penalty and revoked humanitarian parole and asylum for migrants fleeing war zones, persecution, and other human rights violations. He claimed to end the constitutional right to citizenship for children born in the US and deported more than 7,000 immigrants. He ensured we can’t fight global health and climate crises by pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization. And to make sure we can’t fairly and effectively tax corporations, he pulled the US out of the OECD global tax cooperation treaty.

Indeed, it’s been a busy week and a half for the 78-year-old president, and he even fit in two rounds of golf! And, in true Trump fashion, a bout of true chaos.

To help federal agencies implement some of the executive actions the president issued in his first few days, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memo this week. The two pages directed agencies to review all (2,600) of the spending programs within their jurisdictions within two business days—no biggie. As part of this review, agency staff were instructed to answer normal things about these funding programs—have any funds been promised to beneficiaries by March 15, what’s the email of the person in charge of this program—and not so normal things, like does this program promote gender ideology.

Upon submitting their completed questionnaires, the administration would review the answers—while federal agencies paused all spending—to ensure the programs are funding things “consistent with the law and the President’s priorities.” When the president claimed “the golden age of America begins right now” at his inauguration, he apparently meant taking away meals from low-income seniors, closing down preschools for poor children, and kicking homeless veterans out of their temporary housing.

In the hours that followed, Trump’s White House scrambled. His press secretary assured us, “To individuals at home who receive direct assistance from the federal government: You will not be impacted by this federal freeze.” And yet, the entire online system for Medicaid—a program with 72 million beneficiaries—shut down. Less than 48 hours (and a temporary injunction) later, Trump’s OMB was forced to rescind the memo. For a few fleeting minutes, we thought that meant the freeze had been reversed. But Trump’s press secretary quickly clarified that in fact, the freeze remained in effect. But also that it still didn’t apply to direct assistance programs. And that it only applied to spending on things like DEI and the Green New Deal.

These clarifications (if you can call them that) do little to provide any sense of stability to the organizations that rely on federal funds to provide millions of Americans with food, housing, health care, education, and other vital resources. And neither this OMB order, nor any of Trump’s executive actions in his first week and a half, reduced how much working families have to pay for these goods and services or any others. But don’t worry: His vice president assured us last week, it’s just “going to take a little bit of time.” Perhaps while we wait around, we can all read the MLK and JFK assassination records that Trump ordered to be declassified on his first day.

If Trump’s strategy is to “flood the zone,” he’s succeeding. It’s dizzying to keep track of just everything this administration is doing. It’s overwhelming—and almost laughable—when you line it all up. It can be easy to giggle when his cabinet nominees get into screaming matches about onesies or when he asks if he should go for a swim to visit the site of a tragic helicopter crash. But real people get hurt not just from the direct, cruel things they are doing, like cutting PEPFAR and corralling and deporting migrants, but also from the chaos. His hope is that we get distracted by the sillier gaffes, drawing our attention away from the harm and enabling him and his people to get away with it. Instead, it’s important for all of us—especially those in positions of power—to pay attention to the unfulfilled promises of lowering costs and protecting American families and hold him accountable.

If you ask Eleanor

"We can only hope that out of this period of chaos will come again a free world where children will not starve or be confined against their will."

- Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day (May 13, 1942)

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