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The funding freeze it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”.
It feels like a lot of people here are doing the same thing progressives do when asked to defend affirmative action - they just come up with reasons why it might be a good thing, don't think about if it makes sense in context, and then argue it. Yeah, we need diversity because it makes teams more effective, diversity means different backgrounds and experiences, and look at this n=25 study from 2008!
In this case, Trump could have just said 'this funding freeze will go into effect in 90 days', and the agencies and departments would've all started begging for their money pretty quickly, without actually being defunded. Or just, like, used any other method of investigating what the government's spending money on, such as Google or the large amount of public data. These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web! Actually shutting it all down immediately doesn't accomplish much, other than making a lot of people mad or enthused on twitter.
And what would that accomplish? You think USAID would say "Ok, you got us! We won't sponsored subversive operations in Eastern Europe anymore, and will focus on vaccines for Africans"? I think they'd use the 90 days to set up more NGO's that fund NGO's, to pretend that they never sponsored subversion to begin with.
I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.
... From the OP: "forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”, without also shutting down the anti-fentanyl work in mexico. obviously?
It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts. Because they aren't legal by established law and precedent (Impoundment Control Act). If I thought govt spending was about to permanently decrease by more than 20%, I'd be saying very different things (even though I also don't like the focus on cutting spending vs making govt better, more effective)
And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing, and nobody knowing there's anything that should be cut. Again, what good is letting them do that? Or put another way: how does that plausibly lead to cutting away the waste?
So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut. When the Supreme Court ruling comes around, they'll know exactly where to take the hatchet to.
Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent, and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied. The denial process can be unilateral and impossible to appeal, if we want, and that would still be much better than freezing everything Day One while giving grifters no more of an out.
This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.
If they never actually explained in the first place, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it?
In the alternative...
If they were useless from the start but also able to obfuscate to both get initially funded and re-funded since, why should a proposal to rely on detecting known liars after their repeated success?
Especially if the system's managers are- by the fact that they were persuaded by the corrupt lies in the first place- either unable or unwilling to screen fraud programs from legitimate programs from the start?
There are certainly reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but your proposals are structured to keep the grifters in, not least because the grifters were clearly not being successfully caught by the people who were supposed to be checking for grifters.
They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification. The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.
To which the question you dodged repeats:
If they never actually explained in the first place to a non-DEI bureaucrat, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it to a non-DEI bureaucrat?
And they won't have to if the formerly-DEI bureaucrats are the arbitrators of such-and-such buzzwords being sufficient evidence of goodness or not, which is what you have if you insist that they review all the programs and decide which one to cut rather than let their senior executive branch leadership circumvent them and do things like cut.
Note, after all, the reason that they have to be circumvented is because they can't be replaced- the existing employment laws do not allow for just direct firing and replacement hiring of DEI-managers with non-DEI managers. Nor does the budgeting authorities allow for simply hiring a new cadre of reviewers on top of the existing ones- the budgeting authorities are only for so much money and often for so many billets, and the lawful hiring processes are controlled by the category of bureaucrats being circumvented as part of the problem.
Which is among the reasons to think grifters will still be able to 'fool' people- the bureaucracy does not reflect the viewpoint of the executive, and does not change as the executive does, and much of the bureaucracy was never fooled as much as on-board with the measure and sympathetic to keeping it for the same reason they were sympathetic to approving and keeping it before. DEI didn't force approvals of things like operas abroad- it was compatible with the ideological interests of the people who did the approving, and the people who would do the reviewing.
The DEI-shaped bureaucrats who thought 'we will abide by such and such buzzwords' are still DEI-shaped people who think DEI is Good Things that Good People do. The resistance of such bureaucrats to executive branch pressure to change was demonstrated both in the past with The Resistance 1.0, and has been explicitly called for with attempts to build a Resistance 2.0 coalition which opposes the goals, not just the means, of the DOGE.
The (many) examples of internal resistance to first Trump administration are what give plenty of reason to doubt that the current middle-management which previously regularly frustrated efforts will be sincerely compliant this time.
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