On the second Monday of the fascist regime, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Matthew Vaeth, issued a government-wide memo placing a “temporary pause” on agency grants, loans and other financials assistance programs. This move came in concert with the firing of the top management at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is responsible for administering foreign aid and programs.

The Trump administration has cleared out much of the leadership of the U.S. Agency for International Development, placing dozens of career officials on administrative leave Monday after accusing the agency of trying to “circumvent” President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing all foreign aid, U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.

The first thing to note about these two moves is that they are both recklessly disruptive. In the latter case, it created immediate crises all across the globe:

Prominent examples of halted aid include a program to combat HIV worldwide that is credited with saving about 25 million lives; a 40,000-person refugee camp in Syria; and financing that the State Department gives to Ukraine and Taiwan for weapons.

On Monday, the State Department issued a waiver that renewed the contracts related to the refugee camp for two more weeks, but the vast majority of other programs have not received the same treatment.

As for the former case, it’s instructive to read Steve Vladeck’s take on the impact.

The freeze purports to be temporary—and only “to the extent permissible” by law, whatever that means. Thus, the Vaeth memo directs all agencies that administer affected funds to submit detailed lists of projects suspended under the new order by February 10. Those agencies in turn must assign “responsibility and oversight” to tracking the federal spending to a senior political appointee, not a career official. But there is no guarantee that the spigot will be turned back on in two weeks; and in the interim, the withholding of so much money will almost certainly cause irreparable harm to at least some of the affected parties even if it’s fully restored at the end of the “pause.” Thus, even if this measure is a stopgap (and that’s debatable at best), it’s one that is likely to cause numerous crises all its own.

As Vladeck ably details, the Vaeth memo is effectively a confession of a crime, because the executive branch is not legally permitted to do this. It is in immediate noncompliance with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Under that law, the president can pause spending authorized by Congress, but it must be notified, which it wasn’t in this case.

Enacted in response to an unprecedented volume of impoundment efforts by President Nixon, the Act creates a procedural framework within which the President can attempt to impound certain appropriated funds. Specifically, the ICA creates a fast-track procedure for Congress to consider a President’s request (a “special message”) to rescind funds he identifies for reasons he specifies.

Under the statute, the President may defer spending those funds for up to 45 days following such a request (which, it should be noted, he hasn’t made yet). But if Congress does not approve the President’s rescission request within 45 days of receiving it, then the funds must be spent. What’s more, the ICA specifically exempts certain appropriated funds from even the ICA’s impoundment procedure—those that are “required” or “mandated” to be spent by the relevant statute. At least some of those funds are necessarily encompassed within the pools of funds frozen by the Vaeth memo.

Because Congress was not notified prior to the impoundment of these funds, the move is not legal. And even if it had been notified, there are funds impacted here that are not covered under the provisions of the law. This is a plain and simple power grab that, if allowed to stand, would render the legislature virtually powerless.

Vladeck predicts that the administration will be sued six weeks to Sunday, and that their legal defense will be that the Impoundment Control Act is an unconstitutional limitation on executive power. He doesn’t predict that the Supreme Court will side with the administration, but he’s not exactly 100 percent confident of that outcome.

One of the more concerning aspects of the Vaeth memo that might fly under the radar is its insistence that all government “agencies must, for each Federal financial assistance program, assign responsibility and oversight to a senior political appointee to ensure Federal financial assistance conforms to Administration priorities.” Essentially, (as can be seen also by the firings at USAID, down to the level of deputy administrators) the administration is putting Gauleiters in charge of all government agencies and programs, and sidelining professional and experienced civil servants. 

Something similar happened on the second day of the fascist regime when they “reassigned key senior officials across multiple divisions” of the Justice Department” to positions for which they had no experience or expertise in a naked attempt to get them to resign. Is some cases, this has already reached the intended result:

Corey Amundson, the U.S. Justice Department’s senior career official in charge of overseeing public corruption and other politically sensitive investigations, resigned on Monday after the Trump administration tried to reassign him to a new role working on immigration issues, according to a letter seen by Reuters.

In 1933, Hitler chose Gauleiter Bernhard Rust as the Prussian Minister for Science, Culture and Public Education. In that role, he “set about to reshape the German educational system to conform to his ideals of Nazism” by, among other things, issuing “a rule that students and teachers should greet each other with the Nazi salute ‘as a symbol of the new Germany.'” This was expected even of non-party members. He was appointed Reichsminister of Science, Culture and Public Education in 1934, and opposed Albert Einstein’s theories on the grounds that “the Negro or the Jew will view the same world in a different light from the German investigator.”

This is the type of the thing you should expect in our new fascist regime. The Vaeth memo justifies the suspension of federal spending by arguing for the need to “align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities” rather than the legislature. It goes on to insist “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

We see the anti-scientific bias in the  denial of climate change and equation of clean energy with “social engineering.” This bias was bolstered on the first day of the fascist regime with the issuance of the DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT executive order, which denied the reality of gender fluidity and ambiguity by stating, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

We see the familiar fascist language about “Marxist equity,” which echoes Hitler’s 1923 observation that “Our German workers have two souls. One is German, the other is Marxian. We must arouse the German soul. We must root out the taint of Marxism. Marxism and Germanism, like German and Jew, are antipodes.”

Here’s more from that interview:

“Why,” I asked Hitler, “do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?”

“Socialism,” he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, “is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

“Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

“We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”

And here is Trump speaking on Monday at the House Republican Issues Conference at the Trump National Doral Miami Resort:

But in a political earthquake, we won a wave of support from labor unions, including massive numbers of autoworkers, which gave us Michigan as an example.

Think of that, we won Michigan easily, and we did tremendous with the autoworkers. An overwhelming majority of the rank-and-file membership of the Teamsters.

The Teamsters were great. They showed up in droves, and we won them by a lot.

Together, we’re forging a new political majority that’s shattering and replacing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, which dominated American politics for over 100 years…

…Under our leadership, the Republican Party has become the proud voice of hardworking American citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed. We’ve become the party of the American dream, wealth creation for everyone, not just the rich.

If we do our job over the next 21 months, not only will House Republicans be reelected and expand our majority in 2026, we will cement a national governing coalition that will preserve American freedom for generations to come. There has never been anything like what’s happened in politics in the last few years.

The only real distinction there is that Trump claims to represent working people of “every race, religion, color, and creed” while Hitler very explicitly did not. But this distinction is empty as can be seen by executive order the fascist regime issued on Day One, called ENDING RADICAL AND WASTEFUL GOVERNMENT DEI PROGRAMS AND PREFERENCING. The order banned all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the federal government on the pretense that they are discriminatory towards white people who intrinsically have more merit. At this point, the regime is already tearing down “Employment Discrimination is Illegal” posters in federal offices and banning federal employee resource groups (ERGs), including “a volunteer musical group that was part of the Hispanic ERG” which was “told by group leadership that it could no longer perform at any official company events.”

The regime may have done a good job at improving the GOP’s performance with racial minorities, but they are aggressively moving to limit their employment opportunities in government. Still, they claim the mantle of nationalism and the ownership of FDR’s socialist-minded New Deal coalition.

These things will continue until the fascist regime is defeated.