Are the grants that the federal government makes to states federal financial assistance? Apparently so. That spending includes Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the poor. The federal government spends nearly $600 billion annually on Medicaid. On Tuesday Senator Ron Wyden reported that Medicaid portals providing that money were shut down in all 50 states. So were at least some portals that provide money to the federal Head Start program, according to NBC News, and for rental assistance, according to The Washington Post. Also likely affected is the food stamp program, which sends $113 billion annually to the states.
Other programs that are potentially affected, according to NBC News and The Washington Post, include the federal school lunch program, the Women Infants and Children nutrition program, the Medicare enrollment assistance program, mine inspections, meat inspections, cancer research, bioterrorism defense, and the Interior Department’s wildfire preparedness program. (We’re all indebted, incidentally, to the independent journalist Marisa Kabas for breaking this story in her newsletter, The Handbasket.)
It’s possible the Trump administration never realized how much money the OMB memo would hold up. It is, after all, committed to the paranoid fantasy that the federal government is managed by an out-of-control Deep State. In fact, the number of civil servants working in the administrative state today is about the same as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. (According to Axios, Trump is offering them all a buyout to quit, though where the buyout money would come from is anybody’s guess.) Federal spending has grown tremendously since the mid-twentieth century, but that growth has been managed not by federal bureaucrats but by federal contractors, who outnumber federal employees more than two to one. Indeed, as Donald F. Kettl argues in the current issue of The Washington Monthly, we need more civil servants to supervise or replace these contractors, not fewer. (Incidentally, I strongly recommend the entire issue, which offers 10 ideas for Democrats to win back the working class, a topic dear to my heart.)
