Federal funding freeze freakout (01-29-2025--Hour2)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] Literally moments ago, the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget sent out another memorandum, M-25-14, subject line rescission of M-25-13, states thusly, one sentence, OMB memorandum M-25-13 is rescinded.

[00:00:55] Oh, and then there's a second sentence. If you have questions about implementing the President's executive orders, please contact your agency general counsel. Okay. I suspect there's going to be another memo coming on this because the first one just covered too much for them, I think, to just abandon what the intent was.

[00:01:20] So let's just pretend the rescission hasn't occurred yet, okay? Because I did all the show prep, people. I did all of this work. I read all of this stuff. I'm not going to let it go to waste. I should have done it in the first hour. I should have just stuck to my plan, done it in the first hour, and then the rescission could have come and it wouldn't have mattered. But then we wouldn't have heard Bernie Sanders demanding RFK Jr. disavow a onesie. So, eh, life is tradeoffs, you know?

[00:01:48] Alrighty, so let us start with... Yeah, we'll start with the CNN story. I have some... Well, actually, you know what? No, I'm going to do what I set out to do. I'm going to start with the freakout. Because before we find out what exactly is and is not in this memorandum that got everybody's dander up,

[00:02:11] prompting lawsuits from Baby Jesus and his fellow attorneys general, Democrat attorneys general from around the country. Baby Jesus is Jeff Jackson. He got that name from his fellow Democrats while he was a state legislator. But they don't really call him that anymore. Because now he's actually done stuff. That's why they called him. Was that he was like... He was held up as this, you know, godlike figure, even though he, like, didn't do anything yet.

[00:02:41] He was like, yes, he's godlike and all, but he's just the baby, so he hasn't done anything yet. Anyway, here was some of the freakout. This came from our governor, Josh Stein, our attorney general, Jeff Jackson, both Democrats, and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

[00:03:09] So the memo comes out and it says, hey, we're going to suspend the funding for a whole bunch of federal grants so we can, you know, figure out what's going on with all of them. And we want you guys, all of these agencies that are distributing these grants, to review, to make sure that they are in line with the president's executive orders. And then they list the executive orders. And I'm going to go deeper on that. But just that's sort of the setting of the table here.

[00:03:40] So Democrats see this. And of course, like, now this is an existential threat to their permanent managerial class. Because the people who go to work for the government to hand out these grants, generally speaking, are Democrats. And the NGOs, the non-governmental organizations that literally survive off of the federal money,

[00:04:06] they are run generally by Democrats. Democrats. And this is an existential threat. Because if the government is now going to suspend these grants and you have built your entire business model or nonprofit model on funding from GovCo, you need the funding from GovCo to continue. And so any threat to that is a threat to you.

[00:04:31] So responding to their donors and voters, Democrats pounced, dare I say seized on the issue, sprung into action, and began the fear-mongering. Everyone is going to die. Okay? I mean, it is like everything. It's, yeah, you're going to have, you know, grandma thrown off the cliff. You're going to have kids not getting educated. You're going to have kids starving to death,

[00:05:00] old people starving to death, people dying in the streets, homeless people not getting homes, like all sorts of the, you know, everything in the parade of horribles. Okay? Josh Stein, quote, Like many of you, I am concerned that freezing federal funding will hurt North Carolinians, especially those recovering in Western North Carolina. My office is currently reviewing and seeking clarity

[00:05:26] about what OMB's order to freeze federal grants means for our state. We are also working with federal partners to ensure people in Western North Carolina get the support that they need. By the way, former Speaker of the House, now Congressman Tim Moore, he put out a statement, and it says, So just be aware,

[00:05:55] that is not impacted. There are a lot of things, actually, that are not impacted. That had Democrats, I guess, read the memo, they would see are not impacted. But, causing the confusion is the play. This is part of the playbook. This is the exact same playbook as the, quote, don't say gay bill, and all of it, where there was just another example of it the other day, where,

[00:06:24] with the DEI prohibition that Trump put in place for federal agencies, and Pete Hegseth endorsed in the Department of Defense, and they were like, well, now we can't teach about the Tuskegee Airmen, or Tuskegee Airmen. And, um, Hegseth was like, don't be ridiculous, that's stupid. Yes, of course, we can still teach about that. It's a piece of history. And, that's the same playbook.

[00:06:55] Which is, take a law that has popular support, twist it, and make the most absurd enforcement action that you can find, and then say, that's because of this law, when in fact, it was your decision to do that. So, in the, the don't say gay book ban stuff out of Florida, Canada,

[00:07:24] which did not ban any books, if you wanted to read, you know, Charlie Has 17 Dads, you could read that book. You could buy the book, right? You can go to a bookstore and see it. In fact, if you go to bookstores, that's generally what they offer, like, front-end center all the time, like, there's a heavy promotion of this kind of content. You can find it, you can order it online, they'll deliver it to your house, all that.

[00:07:47] what the law was saying is that you don't get to talk to kids about sex when they are under a certain age. In other words, age-appropriate restrictions, which, in our society, we have had my entire life. We still have it in movies. If you are under a certain age, you don't get to go to any movie you want to see. You have to have a parent with you. You have to be over the age of, what, 17 or something.

[00:08:17] Like, you, like, we have long recognized that certain content is not appropriate for people under certain ages. Right? Like, TikTok videos, not appropriate for anybody over the age of, like, you know, 50. Like, that's the... same thing. So, that's what the state of Florida looked to do. With it, with the public school system, mind you, the system that the government runs,

[00:08:47] the government runs that, ergo, GovCo gets to set those rules, much like the funding of these grants for your non-profits. I have said this for decades, okay? Well, like two. When you get hooked, whether it's at a personal level, with government, like, federal assistance programs and that sort of thing, or state assistance, when you get hooked on those, or if you are a business or a non-profit or something,

[00:09:14] and you get hooked onto government grants, right, it makes you lazy. It makes you less likely to go out and do things and respond to market signals and stuff because you have this pad. I learned this when I actually worked for an NPR affiliate here in town. I was in the membership department, so I knew what was going on with the donations going up. You know, everybody said, oh my gosh, Ronald Reagan,

[00:09:43] he cut the funding for NPR and all this stuff, and it's going to go away. Public broadcasting is going to die without this. No, it's not. People supported it. They donated money to it. That's what happens. If people want the content, content is king. If it's good content, which we, that is debatable, but there's a market for it. People will buy it. People will support it. And if it does, if people don't, that is not an indication that government needs to step in,

[00:10:12] seize money from somebody, and give it to you, even though you're making content nobody wants. That's the point, right? That's the point. All right, so the memo comes out, Josh Stein, oh my gosh, this is terrible. Jeff Jackson, he says, oh my gosh, this is terrible. The sudden freeze in federal funding is so sweeping that it could cause widespread and immediate harm across our state. Delaying disaster recovery, no. Undercutting law enforcement, no.

[00:10:42] Affecting children and veterans, yeah, no. It violates constitutional power over federal spending, and I'm taking legal action to stop it. Oh, fantastic. So, we're going to pay to sue the federal government, basically, ourselves. That's awesome. Thank you, baby Jesus. We appreciate that. And then the Department of Health and Human Services says, for a period of time today, and this is what sent the shockwaves, NC Medicaid was not able to access the payment management services portal,

[00:11:12] but is now able to get into the system. Now that there is access to the portal, we are confirming that requested funding will be received. No impact to beneficiaries. So they went around for the last, like, 24 hours screaming that the Medicaid portal is shut down and now people won't be able to get reimbursements submitted so they can get paid for their health care services they are providing. We don't know why that portal went down. We don't know. Did somebody flip a switch?

[00:11:40] Did it get overwhelmed with traffic when everybody was like, oh my gosh, does this mean I can't submit a payment? And then everybody logged on at the same time and crashed the service? I don't know. Nobody knows. But to the left and the media, but I repeat myself, this was a clear signal that Medicaid shut it down because Trump told them to. Here's an idea. Could it be just like we saw with the book ban, quote unquote, down in Florida and the ban on teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen?

[00:12:08] Could it be that some leftist bureaucrat said, well, if that's where he's going to write it, I'm going to go ahead and shut it down. See how they like it. Or maybe like the closing of the parks, like putting up like big tarps over monuments. So you can't look at them from the street during the shutdown. Right. Stuff like that. People working in the federal government, going to great lengths in order to hurt you unnecessarily. So in order to protect their own gigs.

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[00:14:04] I get the sense that it is in part, not totally, but maybe, but I think it is at least in part due to some recent news events. James O'Keefe, formerly of Project Veritas, now O'Keefe Media Group, and he did another one of these undercover stings on some federal worker who talked about how they were just shoveling money out the door before Biden's exit.

[00:14:33] In the last week or two before they were turning over power, they were just like getting all the green funding grants out the door. And then there was this the other day I saw from Liz McDonald over at Fox News. The new controversy of Biden's Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, at the last minute on Thursday, this was right before the inauguration,

[00:14:59] sending more than $15 billion in Biden's green energy loans to utilities in her home state of Michigan. It's a major wake-up call to the significant taxpayer abuses in the Biden White House. Many of them are her donors to her gubernatorial campaign. Granholm approved a massive $22.9 billion in these 11th hour green loans,

[00:15:29] sending nearly 70% of them to Michigan. That's according to the Beacon. Maybe that's the free beacon, but I'm not sure. Either feathering her political nest or her future in the private sector. Democrats hammered President Trump when he campaigned on draining the swamp in 2016. Nancy Pelosi and Democrats pushed back hard to impeach him on one of 85 targets that they launched. This also defies the Energy Department inspector general,

[00:15:55] who told Granholm to stop the conflicts of interest in these $400 billion slush funds. This highlights, too, a government abuse of power, sending hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money out the door that gets recycled as campaign donations. This is one of the most underreported stories out there. Whose back is getting scratched and for how much? Limbaugh used to talk about this all the time. It's why he referred to it as a money laundering operation.

[00:16:24] You seize through the power and force of GovCo. You take the money from people's paycheck and sales taxes and the like, but mainly income taxes. You take that money. All right. Then you wash it through the administrative state. The employees there get a cut. Then the money gets pushed out the door in the form of grants to these nonprofit groups that then make campaign contributions to Democrats. So the original source of the money is from all taxpayers who may not agree with Democrats.

[00:16:54] But that's that's the operation. And that's what the inspector general warned Granholm against doing. All right. I hope you had a happy holiday season. But tell me if something like this happened at your house. Your family and friends are gathered around. Maybe y'all are in the living room. You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing. And then somebody says, hey, dad, remember those old VHS tapes? Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room gets all quiet.

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[00:17:48] And next year, instead of talking about those memories, imagine gathering the family to watch them together. Talk about a memorable gift. So do what I did. Trust the experts at Create A Video, conveniently located in Mint Hill right off I-485 and online at createavideo.com. You know me. I am a giver. And so I read through the memo that came from the federal government on the funding freeze. So you don't have to.

[00:18:17] Although now it's been rescinded. But I think another one is going to be coming. But what's amazing is the reaction to all of this from the left. And part of it is, as I mentioned the other day, the shock and awe campaign that Trump has been employing. Right? They've had a lot of time to think about what they want to do, to write it all up.

[00:18:35] And it's just a steady barrage of executive orders, announcements, personnel changes, all of this stuff that the left is so scattered on where to direct their focus. And so they're vying with one another to try to get headlines from a media that is also chasing the red dot all over the room, you know? So here is what the memo actually said.

[00:19:04] In fiscal year—I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's two pages, but I'm going to give you the highlights here. Trust me, these are the highlights. In fiscal year 2024, of the nearly $10 trillion that the federal government spent, more than $3 trillion was federal financial assistance, such as grants and loans.

[00:19:23] Career and political appointees in the executive branch have a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through presidential priorities.

[00:19:37] Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending wokeness and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and making America healthy again.

[00:20:04] 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. This memo requires federal agencies to identify and review all federal financial assistance—bookmark one. I'll come back to that.

[00:20:33] So, all federal financial assistance, programs, and supporting activities consistent with the president's policies and requirements. Footnote two. I think I said bookmark, so footnote. All right. So, when it talks about all federal financial assistance, it has a footnote, number one. And if you read that footnote, I know, I'm crazy. I read the footnote. But I felt like it was important to see what they're talking about. It says,

[00:21:01] 2 CFR 201 defines federal financial assistance to mean, quote, assistance that recipients or subrecipients receive or administer in various forms. But this term does not include assistance provided directly to individuals. Individuals. For the purposes of this memorandum, federal financial assistance includes, number one, all forms of assistance listed in these other paragraphs of the definition of the term,

[00:21:30] and assistance received or administered by recipients of sub or subrecipients of any type except for assistance received directly by individuals. That's how you know that this is official law, because it is ridiculously confusing. But the key here is that if it's going to an individual, then it's not part of this. Read the freaking footnotes. And just in case that wasn't clear, footnote number two, which came at the end of that sentence, says,

[00:21:58] nothing in this memo should be construed to impact Medicare or Social Security benefits. But you left out Medicaid. And so that was why they freaked out over the Medicaid. And then, of course, somebody shut down the portal, either accidentally or on purpose. And honestly, I like maybe I'm now cynical, but I'm guessing probably somebody shut it down. Somebody did it on purpose to prove a point.

[00:22:27] They're saying we can't do this so nobody's going to get paid. I'll show them. Boom. I guess they meant we have to shut down Medicaid. To implement these orders, the memo goes on to say, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their federal financial assistance programs to identify programs and projects and activities that may be implicated by any of the president's executive orders.

[00:22:54] So that is a limit on what it is they're telling you to review. So why would Medicaid fall under the list of things? Which, by the way, they list in all of that they're saying, like, Trump issued a series of executive orders and then they list all of them. So these are the EOs that you're supposed to refer to. But if none of those EOs apply to what you're doing, like Medicaid, that doesn't affect you. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law,

[00:23:24] federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance and other relevant agency activities, here again, that may be implicated by the executive orders. Once again, there is the limiting principle put in place right there in the language. It says it right there. That may be implicated by the executive orders.

[00:23:50] If you are doing federal funding, if you are in an agency, you're doing something and it doesn't have anything to do with these other executive orders, it doesn't apply to you. But nobody could read past that because Orange Man bad. Including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, NGOs, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the Green New Deal. They even spell it out for you idiots.

[00:24:18] Here are the things we are talking about. No more funds, no more grants flying out the door if it's not lining up with this administration's priorities. We want you to identify it. We're suspending it. We're pausing it. We're not saying no. We're saying put a pause. We want an accounting. Oh my gosh. How dare you, Orange Man, asking us to show you where the money's going.

[00:24:48] Even before completing their comprehensive analysis, the memo goes on to say, federal agencies must immediately identify any legally mandated actions or deadlines for assistance programs arising while the pause remains in effect. So they're telling these agencies right there in the memo, it says it right there, it says, if you've got funding that has to go out, identify it. Federal agencies must report this information to the Office of Management Budget along with an analysis of the requirement.

[00:25:16] So if you have to spend the money, like say the Medicaid portal has to stay open, then you would go to OMB and be like, hey, we got to keep this open. This is required. This is mandated. This doesn't cover us. And then OMB could say, okay, yeah, no problem. Like, this is willfully, this is being willfully obtuse.

[00:25:42] It's pretending that you don't know what the plain language means. Like, if you cannot understand what this memo is telling you to do, you do not belong on the payroll of my agency. The White House then put out an FAQ because Democrats sabotage and the media aided them and they're stupid.

[00:26:12] Like, so they had to put out an FAQ specifically explaining what is already in the memo. Any program that provides direct benefits to individuals is not subject to the pause. Because any payment required by law to be paid will be paid without interruption or delay. It says it right in the memo. But in case you can't read that, I'm going to write this, which you obviously won't read either. Because narratives. That's the point.

[00:26:42] All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news.com.

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[00:27:40] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. We're going over this memo that went out to federal agencies, the funding freeze, which about an hour ago, the White House rescinded it because Democrats in media, but I repeat myself, they were so confused by all of this. I don't know what to make of anything.

[00:28:08] And then, of course, the Medicaid portal shuts down where the providers go to get reimbursements and stuff. I'd like to know who did that. No, no, no. Let me rephrase that. I demand to know what happened there. And maybe it was overloading of the system. Maybe it was just an outage, unrelated, coincidental, whatever.

[00:28:32] But I suspect if passed this prologue in any indication, I suspect somebody pulled the plug on it. Somebody flipped that switch. Somebody did it just like the librarians took, you know, books off the shelf like classics. You know, we got to take Huckleberry. Actually, no, they took that one off the shelf before the book ban. We got to take To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh, I know they took that one off the shelf, too, for woke reasons.

[00:29:01] So they're like, well, I guess we got to take Dr. Seuss. Oh, wait, no, that one, too. Anyway, so they're like, oh, I guess we have no books on our side. They would take all these pictures. No books on the shelves. Look at that. Thanks a lot, Republicans. You want everybody stupid. Like, no, no, no. The people running K-12 education, they've obviously wanted to make everybody stupid. That's mission accomplished. Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, put out a tweet.

[00:29:29] He said, I spoke to senior officials at the White House and confirmed the temporary pause by OMB does not impact individual assistance and will not interrupt disaster recovery efforts, school and child care funding, health care for seniors or low-income families, funding for our roads, meals and lunches, or any of the other misinformation that has been spread.

[00:29:57] The partisan stunt to disseminate knowingly misleading information is dangerous, fear-mongering and completely wrong. President Trump is doing what an executive should do at the beginning of a term, which is find out where the money is and where it's going. Not unlike what we did at the beginning of our term here in Virginia, when we identified $1.4 billion in appropriated but unspent taxpayer money. And that is exactly right.

[00:30:27] Pat McCrory talked about this, I remember, when he became governor. And he went and he started touring the various state agencies. And he would go in there and he talked about that there were employees who literally hid under desks because they did not want to be seen because of who they were getting a job that was like just a job in name only.

[00:30:55] There were people on the payroll drawing a salary that didn't actually do anything. This occurs all the time. This is not something specific to the public sector. This happens in the private sector as well. But there are far fewer controls in the public sector. There is a fellow on Twitter, he goes by the name of Lafayette Lee, and he said the bureaucracy had already become a distinct political class with attitudes, interests, and motivations of its own.

[00:31:24] A powerful political bureaucracy completely out of step with the rest of the country and immune to the political process was and is a serious problem. So just a quick question. What did you think people meant on the right when they said we want to reduce the size of government? What do you think that meant?

[00:31:52] Do you think that meant like nobody is going to be let go? Do you think that meant nobody is going to like no agencies are going to have budgets slashed? Do you think none of the funding gets pulled back? Because that's actually exactly what that means. When the right talks about reducing the size and scope and reach of the federal government particularly, that's what it means. It has always meant that. So when you come in like, oh my gosh, these people are going to get laid off. Like, we are aware. Yes, we are aware.

[00:32:20] And we don't believe that all of those jobs are necessary. There is a view on the right that a lot of the federal workers, not all of them, there are a lot of good people doing necessary work. I am not an anarchist. But there are a lot of people that are in those jobs as essentially a UBI, a universal basic income, right? It's a jobs program for a lot of employees.

[00:32:49] And then they vote to keep the party in power. So it's sort of like a transfer of the money to them. So it's, I guess, to be more like a TBI, which makes sense. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here.

[00:33:14] You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.