I have spent years railing against long government memos with languorous timelines. How about a two-pager? Where’s the urgency?
Careful what you wish for. OMB’s two-pager on grants, with its 24-hour deadline, dropped like a bomb on a trillion-dollar grantmaking enterprise (and that’s just at HHS). It risks wreckage across the country.
The memo required agencies to pause all spending, with a footnote exempting “assistance received directly by individuals.” HHS suspended states from drawing down Medicaid funds and tribal facilities from drawing down Indian Health Service Funds. Also suspended were grants that provide funds for Head Start, child care, LIHEAP, and more. By midday yesterday, OMB issued a corrective note explaining that the footnote excluded Medicaid and Head Start, as well as other programs like SNAP and Pell grants. That was good, if incoherent, since Medicaid makes payments through intermediaries (states, which may in turn pay managed care organizations which pay providers) as much as any federal program. And the order leaves in the crosshairs, just at HHS, programs offering drug treatment and mental health services, funding foster care, serving the homeless, engaging in medical research, and on and on.
Many of us desperately want to simplify the government’s rules and procedures, but that does not mean we want no rules at all. When a state or grantee receives a grant from the federal government, the receipt of the grant does not turn that state or grantee into a vassal or a subject who can only appeal for the king’s mercy. (Justice Kennedy must have written something ponderous about this.) And the main requirement at issue here is modest: If the government committed to do something, it should follow through.
What is remarkable is how easily the Administration could have pursued the same ideological goals in a more orderly way. They could have changed the requirements only in pending grants announcements and agreements not yet signed. They could have tackled agreements that renew annually as those renewals arise. For multiyear grants, they could have worked with the Republican-controlled Congress to change grant terms at the end of the fiscal year. Federal grantees all understand, or reasonably should, that their money is subject to appropriations law. Law and edict are different things.
Even for a team in a hurry, they could have thought it through.
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