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Notes -
Reuters:
Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans
Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say
Apparently based on this memo (pdf).
This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.
Also, impoundment? We'll see?
I can understand the logic of cutting off all funding first and then re-opening the spigot only to programs that reveal themselves as essential, so I will reserve judgement on this policy (if it even survives its first appearance in court) until we see how the second part is supposed to work. If it ends up taking long enough that most university and national lab research grinds to a halt and children in Africa start dying of AIDS because local workers are not allowed to hand over drugs that have been already been purchased and delivered, then I will consider it a grave blunder.
Are you counting malicious compliance in that assessment?
I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"
We saw it in Florida with the don't say gay bill, where a bunch of pro keeping pornography in schools teachers just got rid of all their books because "they were just so afraid of getting in trouble".
Arguably we've seen it repeatedly with pro-abortion doctors letting patients die, where the law clearly states that are allowed to treat them, because of abortion bans. Or maybe to be more charitable to the doctors, the patients make a lot of really dumb healthcare choices, and the press invents that story around it.
I've seen enough of it where I simply do not care. These people are going to throw temper tantrums, sociopathically let people come to harm despite the obvious reading of the order not requiring them to do, or even explicitly telling them not to, and they'll blame Trump. Every single day will be a new misleading headline characterizing every one of these bureaucratic tantrums as Trump's singular fault.
Honestly it's not all that different from when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, and the generals did it in the shittiest most passive aggressive way possible to make him look like an idiot retard. Which... I mean we've since learned he may have been. Which I guess made the general's sabotage super effective. Supposedly that was the moment his popularity tanked and never recovered.
But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.
Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues who are still doing DEI sub rosa is something you only do if you want this kind of panicked overcompliance. Given the racial politics of parts of the US conservative movement, I have no doubt that the kind of person who signs up to be an anti-DEI purge enforcer wants the Tuskegee Airmen removed from the curriculum, and Trump only walked this back when it became clear it was upsetting the normies. There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.
No, the GOP thinks the Tuskegee airmen are a perfectly acceptable and normal thing to have as a history lesson in Air Force basic training.
Because the south surrendered and accepted reintegration into the United States. Bragg is a singularly unimpressive figure, but the existence of confederate names is to celebrate the south’s American-ness. The occupation is over and it has been for centuries. We don’t want a designated villain role that allows a de-facto not de-jure occupation.
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