Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and House Democrats will force a Flora vote this week on the Matt Gates Ethics Report. We have such a great show for you today Bloomberg Opinions. Tim O'Brien talks about what we can expect from Trump two point zero. Then we'll talk to pro public as Molly Redden about how Trump plans to take powers from Congress to change the federal government.
But first the news, So.
Molly, our mayor, our mayor. He has got a lot of charges against him, which a lot of people don't realize. And I'll be shocked to tell you he's sucking up to the guy who gives lots of pardons out, mister Donald Trump.
None of this should come as a surprise.
Mayor Adams indicted, has more federal investigations swirling around him. Many people from his administration have resigned or married each other or both. He is really in political danger. And when someone is in political danger for influenced trading with Turkey or doing crimes, they tend to find a way to mister Trump. Because for mister Trump, and he's said this, ethical problems are not necessarily disqualifying, or in fact, they
may in some cases be qualifying. So here we have my man Eric Adams saying that he will basically deport migrants and this is the way he's trying to curry favor with Trump. Mayor Adams incorrectly asserted, by the way, this is the guy who said that cheese is like Heroin. He's not factually always completely accurate. May Or Adams on Tuesday incorrectly asserted that undocumented immigrants are not entitled to
the right of due process under the US Constitution. He said, the Constitution is for Americans.
That is not true.
By the way, the Constitution is for America, but it does not limit itself to just citizens. And this phrasing the Constitution is for Americans reminds me a whole lot of Stephen Miller, who said America is for Americans, and America is for Americans is a line that was used during really darkest times in anti civil rights movement, the anti civil rights, the white supremacist movement in this country. So it is a really dark that he said this. He continued at a press conferencing I'm not a person
that's snuck into this country. My ancestors have been here a long time. Again, not how any of this works a country built on immigrants. Legal experts disputed Adam's claims. They claims have no basis in law. I would add the Mayor's claims have no basis in anything, and never have. We're going to have a legal fight that is going to be mind bending here in New York City when Donald tries to start deporting people from a city that has been long a sanctuary city. This is going to
get really ugly. And again, I hate this so much, and no one wanted this, and it's going to get really ugly, and maybe voters won't care, but I hope that they can see how this serves no one at all.
Yeah. I can't wait for Mayor Adams to roll out the red carpeting of the key to the city. These guys. So, in speaking of other people who continually disappoint us, we have more fun at the Supreme Court.
Yeah.
So Supreme Court today is Wednesday. They're listening to a very big oral argument. Again. They won't come out with an answer until they go on vacation in June because you know never it's important to not have to have accountability for your legal decisions. And this is not should not be surprising. Is a state lawn Tennessee is blocking minors from accessing gender affirming care in the state.
This is just like spaight right in Texas.
The idea here is that state level law tries to enact a ban, then you know it'll either get it'll either go through or it won't. And then if it goes through, you can see this enacted.
On a national level.
And I think it's important to remember, like Republicans are about to control the Senate, the House, and the presidency. So even though they would need sixty votes to enact a federal law, they are working on all sorts of complicated legal maneuvering, using laws that are out of date or rarely used, doing different kinds of things like that to enact different laws to hit different legal loopholes. So I would be shocked if there was not if there was not some kind of you know, this is part
of a larger plan to make things inaccessible. And whether or not you believe in trans healthcare for children, I think it's worth thinking about whether or not you want the federal government to make choices like this for your children, and I think larger than that. This is not necessarily about that. It's about what is the federal government's place in your life and in my life.
This is very scary.
I agree, this is not looking good.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has been tasked with an ethics code, right, because I don't know if you know this, but last year there was quite a lot of reporting, and I think it's worth remembering. This is why the right hates reporters so much. There was a lot of reporting about Justice Alito and Justice Thomas getting pressed, taking trips, drinking fine wines and champagnes.
It was really blockbuster reporting. So the court's three last liberals, Kegan Sodamayar and Katanji Brown Jackson, want some kind of enforcement of an ethics code, but the Trump judges are not fans.
Justice Gorsich objects.
To the idea of a code that's anything more than voluntary. You'll be shocked to hear that Thomas and Alito benefit fisuaries of numerous private jet trips also back him up. So the conservative majority, Gorsa, Chamath Alito do not want enforcement mechanisms.
We're sort of seeing.
This play out, and at the end of the day, Scotis placed no restrictions on taking gifts, accepting travel, or real estate deals.
All of which Justice Thomas.
Has come under fire for doing, which is incredible, right, like just one circuit down, you know this stuff would be career ending, but at the highest court in the land, you good. So they placed no restrictions on taking gifts, and the Justice gave themselves a broad carve out for book deals, just as so to my Air received three point seven million for her memoir and her children's books came under fire for using court staff for book events. I mean, these guys could really use an ethics code.
I mean, obviously so to my Year. It's not anything like what the situation was with Thomas. But I think it's a really important point that there should be an ethics code for the Supreme Court and it should be enforceable, and instead the code just states that justices should not
be swayed bipartisan interests. And Michael Wallman, the president of the Brenett Center for Justice, who has been on this podcast and will again be on this podcast, said these rules are more loophole than law, and I think that's a really important point. These guys really need to have ethical guardrails. And it's just as we say a Shonda. Tim O'Brien is an editor at Bloomberg Opinion. Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics, Tim O'Brien.
I'm Molly, how are you? Oh, I'm Marvi. Everything's normal in America right now.
Let's talk about this because you're so smart. It's true, and we're so fucked as a country. But it's like one of these moments where it feels like it's sort of a little bit beyond reality. I always feel like before a new administration comes in, there's always a sense that perhaps everything we thought about them was wrong, and maybe they will be this, you know. I feel like this happened before the first Trump admin too, that perhaps all of us are overreacting. Discuss so one.
You sort of want to, like Q Rod Serling right to say, like, right, imagine the country, you know, governed by an unhinged individual with no object expertise or Pollo's interest.
Elected because he was afraid of going to jail.
Well, I think that's why he was passionate about running. For sure, you wanted to get out of jail free card. I think Trump one point zero had real consequences. There wasn't the kind of institutional wrecking ball impact that people were concerned about them that I think could very well happen in Trump two point zero. But the Supreme Court had a generational change that is affecting people's lives. You just need to look at reproductive rights as one example
of that. I think the US is standing in the world as a kind of enforcer of democratic norms when it's behaving well has been diminished and people took advantage of that. And then I think domestically, just the what is now considered acceptable kind of public dialogue about really important issues has gotten degrade it and we're in the midst of kind of a frat party populated and hosted mainly by white guys.
Yeah, the one cold comfort is that he has this insane coalition that I think will be very hard to please.
Well, because you know, the coalition both parties have spent I think since really since the late nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. They're working. Americans in fairly broad numbers have bounced between the parties because their standing in the world has been diminished living wages for average Americans has declined significantly since the nineteen eighties, and you have a big portion of Americans who feel adrip and I don't think either party has come to their aid with constructive
long term solutions. And I say that as well with the idea that they're it will be hard for anyone to provide constructive long term solutions to some of this because we've been in the midst of this epic technological change and the old economy got undermined by it. And it's not the first time it's happened in US history. It'll happen again. But our fellow Americans get buffeted and really ruthless and undignified ways on the waves of those things.
I also think alongside that has been a growing desire for disenfranchised Americans to become more franchise, and that expresses itself in a lot of unmanageable ways, whether they're voters of color, or women or new immigrants. You can just
pick off all the boxes. And historically people will look back at this as not twenty sixteen to twenty twenty four, but we'll look at it as you know, nineteen eighty to twenty twenty four and beyond, and we're just in the midst of it, and some of the bigger patterns are hard to see, but it's a really we are living in a really intense epoch.
You've opened the door to me doing something really annoying, which is I have been you never do that, and never. I've been rereading the paranoid style in American Offseutter. He talks about these status elections, elections that are based on status anxiety and not necessarily on material more nuanced.
That it's more about anxiety than financial well being.
And in some ways twenty sixteen, you had voters voting in a much more clear way. Right, you had Hispanic and black voters voting for the Democrat. You had white, non college educated, white college educated, more of a coalition going for Trump. Now that has sort of flipped on its head in twenty twenty four. So you had Hispanic voters,
you had some black voters voting for Trump. Was not on race and class was a subtext that we have not talked about very much or written about for any number of reasons.
And I'm wondering if you could just talk about that.
Well, the other thing I would say, is the other kind of great companion book to the paranoid style is intellectualism in American life, which, you know, he identified the kind of resentment of elite that has always run through American history. You know, it used to be getting a college degree was a badge of honor that you were trying to better yourself on the world, and in recent years it's become this sort of symbol that you live in a bubble and you're not solving real world problems
and you only care about yourself. I never think there is one explanation of big voting changes. I think a lot of things went into this election, but I think you can't ignore basic pocketbook issues and that are so intense. And when I say, I think, I would, you know, inflation became this barometer for like the bogeyman that was haunting consumers because they were seeing higher gas prices and higher growthcery prices. I just think it's actually the straw
that broke the camel's back. I think the larger issue
has been affordability. Average Americans feel like they can't afford houses, and they can't afford college for their kids, and they can't stay for the retirements in total, they actually can't get a piece of the American dream, and that ties into people's dignity and their sense of themselves in the world, and I think that does play out as anxiety, and I would dive from that off fetterish analysis in that regard, and that I think that the reason Latino voters and
black voters moved in meaningful ways along with white women towards Trump, which I think that's a different cohort why white women landed where they did, But for black and Latino voters, to me, I read that as yes, they care about race, and yes they care about their own cultural identities, but first and foremost, they want to put bread on the tables for their families, and they will ally themselves with whoever presents a path through prosperity to them.
And the thing about Trump that is damning in that mix is he has no real interest in doing that. He just rides on this historic brand of the Republicans is being better for business than Democrats, when if you look at the data, democratic presidents that presided over bigger GDP growth far more often than Republicans. And then Trump has this like the host of The Apprentice Mojo and I think the anxiety that comes out of economic uncertainty of cruised to Trump in this moment because he's seen
as a better economic steward. But I think that's how I'm built on stand says, I ask your question and I go in a completely different direction.
Well, it just got me thinking about something else, which is Trump. He ran for election on this idea that he would make things cheaper, right, which was people were upset about inflation. Some of that inflation it was transitory, but longer than we thought. Some of that inflation was because, like the inflation when it comes to mortgages, was because the Fed raised interest rates, so everything was more expensive when it came to money, monetary stuff. You know, to
be able to borrow money. There is no way to make things less expensive except to regulate prices, which no one wants to do in a capitalist country.
But you know what, you can make them more affordable by paying people a better way.
Which is what Democrats were trying to do. But Trump, I just want you to address this fundamental problem that Trump has, which is he has promised to do something.
It's undoable.
It's not only undoable, it is he's actually in pursuit policies that maya words right. He wants to impose tariffs on Mexico and China that would cause import prices despite and the cost of those would all get passed along to consumers. He also wants to deport a mass deportation of eleven million immigrants who are central. A large portion of them are central through the construction business and to hotels and farming and restaurants and home services, et cetera,
et cetera. And if they disappear, the labor prices are going to go up. And if labor prices go up, the cost of living's going to go as wealth for Americans. Trump is a profoundly ignorant man. He latches onto ideas that he will, as he said his first term, only I can fix it, and he presents absurd fixes to complicated But the real thing he benefits from is that his cult believes him.
Yes, I'm wondering if you can talk about sort of like the tension here. For example, Trump has nominated Basant, who is a pretty sort of I would say, largely.
Normal mainstream Wall Street god.
Yeah, made money managing for George Soros discussed.
Gave money get a Democrat back in the day. I've sort of wondered, like when the Trumpies are going to discover this Soros thing and really decide that George Soros is taking over the world now that he's put an acolyte inside the Treasury Department. You know, that's like Taylor made for a Trump World conspiracy, but it hasn't really
surfaced yet. I have to wonder what Scott Besson said to Donald Trump to get nominated for this job, because, you know, the Treasury secretary, unlike the iffse secretary, Secretary of State, some of the other cabinet roles, it's not that powerful a position in the White House, and Fed
Chairman economically is much more powers than treasury secretaries. The Preasury secretaries often become a spokes person for the economic goals of an administration, and when they're really good, they're super effective, like Bob Rubin was, you know, or Jim Baker with different administrations. And so Besson's going to have this tension which between what he knows actually works around economic fixes and economic growths and the malarkey that flows
out of Donald Trump's mouth like a fire hydrant. And he cannot have gotten this job without I think saying to Trump, I will be pro pare, and I will be pro deportation, and I will be pro strong dollar, all these things that have economic impact that Trump backs and which bessn't if he's still thinking the fact pattern
can't really believe. So will he continue to sort of say these things Trump wants him to say, is the economic megaphones for the administration or will he actually start talking about what he really believes and then you know, his life span within the Trump administration shortens dramatically.
It does seem like there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff happening with Republican senators and these cabinet appointments. It seems like they're sort of articulating their views to Trump and his people, and then there's kind of back and forth playing out in front of us. We see this right now with the DoD hegsats. It seems like they're sort of hit a moment with reporting where people have decided.
Too many Trump parties, right, too many strip clubs. One strip club was okay, but by the time it got to like the tenth strip club or.
Whatever, it's the fourth adulterous affair, And you know, the mother's email was problematic, but I guess he was on as we record, he had, I think, done a fots interviewed this morning with them to try to rehabilitate him.
I think the interesting thing to me about the Senate is you have Republicans there trying to stand up for their institutional prerogatives that are historic and well beloved by senators themselves at both parties, and I think there's a meaningful number of Republican centators who don't want to get steamrolled by Trump. And that obviously first surfaced with Gates,
but actually it surfaced before Gates. It surfaced with the tussle over the Senate Majority leader, right where there was obviously pressure by the MAGA Lonis to have Rick Scott the in the Senate Majority leader.
Yeah, and the richest man in the world, Leon Musk.
Yes, And there was a social media pressure for that, and within Marlo Lago there was pressure for it, and the Senate said no, John Thup, And I think that was an important moment. Whether or not that means they have the kind of backbone you would want for them to stand up for core American values for the next four years, we'll have to see, but they certainly felt like, no, we will run our house the way we want, not the way Donald Trump wants to. And then Gates got punted.
And you know you saw Stusan Collins and some others early on say yeah, I don't know, this one makes me nervous. That started to happen around Haig step. But when you look at the list, we still have Tulcy Gabbert in there, and on and on, and you know, Robert Kennedy Jr. You know, these aren't confident people with long track records. And Trump is flooding the zones. So the Stenate really to play a meaningful role here is
going to have to stand up repeatedly. And I don't know if they've got the appetite or interest in doing that. Will have to see.
I wrote this piece this week where I said, you know, the Senate must be forced to stand up because Article two, Section two, this is our job, Timothy Snyder, protect institutions. This is an institution in the Senate protecting a really important institution, the President's cabinet.
I wrote this, and then I thought, you're such an idiot. They're not going to protect the institutions.
Like and a lot of pundits were saying, well, you know, they only can take one scalp, so this means everyone else is going to get through.
That is the test of the Trump era is whether or not people will transcend their narrow electoral interests or of being sliined by Donald Trump. To simply say, I believe in that. You know, everyone remarks on Abraham Lincoln for good reason as a sort of standard bearer for doing the right thing. But he had a moral code that he lived by and it governed his decisions his entire left, and he was fallible, but he died for those values, and he oversaw a war for those values.
And we've done that throughout our history. Whether or not you know this Republican Party right now is willing to stand up for stuff that is baked into the Constitution is going to be tested with Trump in a way. It wasn't an administration because this first administration, he was in preschool. And I'm not prepared to say he's in college now because he needed help to get into college,
as you recall. But he's in high school and he knows enough like to get the car keys and take the car somewhere from We'll have to see.
But the central tension is still the same, right Trump with the aid of this Heritage Foundation, anti government wing of the repub Party. So it'll be there's going to be real tension between what Trump wants, which is to be popular and to spend money, and what this Heritage world wants.
Right totally, and what they actually are prepared to absorb in the service of that vision. You know, the lion's share of government spending is entitlement programs, you know, Medicare, Medicaid, social Security plus defense. That's basically the whole mcgillo. They're not going to take anything out of defense spending. And by the way, Elon Musk benefits from big contracts as
companies get through the Defense Department. So are they going to take out Social Security and alienate seniors while they're cutting taxes that make it harder to fund Social Security. The mathematics here are daunting, and the impact of what they're going to do, if they really intend to carry it out, is daunting. And that comes back to how much of a bomb thrower is Donald Trump? Is he willing to sort of detonate his parties alone actual prospects
because he's only going to stay for one term. In theory, or are they going to start to look at what blowback they get when they try to implement some of these things and they'll back down again. I feel like it's hard to predict which way that's going to go.
No, no, exactly, and I think that's a really good point. It's also a lot is at stake here. Thank you, thank you, Thank you, Tim.
O'Brien, Thank you, Molly. It's always a treat talking rule.
Molly Redden is a reporter of Pro Publica. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Molly, thank you so much for having me.
I'm glad to be here. I'm really excited to have you.
Before we start this interview, I just want to be very annoying here to.
Our listeners for a second. You right, for Pro Publica.
There's like a new, very scary phenomenon where the left is also mad at.
The mainstream media.
And I know that a lot of listeners' podcast are slightly on the left, varying degrees, some center left, some center center. But without reporting like what you do, all of Trump's nominees would have sailed through all of the things that Trump is doing behind the scenes to undermine the federal government. Would work, and so it's just so important that we support organizations like Pro Publica.
Okay, anyway, it's done.
Sorry, that's very annoying, but you wrote this great piece, really important about how Trump plans to seize the power of the person from Congress. This is like not getting nearly as much attention as the sexy nominees who are you know, alcoholic lunatics. But this is the sort of russ Vat kind of stuff that's happening behind the scenes and so important.
So can you talk to us about this?
Yeah?
Thanks, So okay. At its very most basic impoundment is this theory that the president does not have to actually spend the money that Congress appropriates, so spending bills, the federal budget, it starts in Congress, it gets negotiated in Congress, and then they pass a budget or they pass budget bills, bills funding programs and services that we're all familiar with, and then the president signs them and you know, executive brand, the president has a lot of power to decide how
the money gets spent in order to accomplish the goals that Congress spelled out. But under our constitution, the president doesn't get a line item veto. The president doesn't get to say, no, I don't like that program, so I'm not spending the money. And what Trump and some of his very close budget advisors the theory that they're pushing
is actually, yes, he does. He does get to say that if he simply doesn't like a program, if he thinks it's wasteful, he can impound the funds or simply refuse to spend them.
That seems like a very big shift in the way Congress operates. How would mag a world be able to do this.
It would be a huge shift, you know. Right now, the executive branch, as I said, they do have some control over how money gets spent. They get to decide what are the parameters for a program getting this grant for example, again a very basic example, but yeah, it would be an enormous shift. It would essentially say Congress doesn't have the power of the person anymore. Congress can never tell a president to spend money. It can only
give him the option. It would take an Act of Congress to one overturn a law that they passed in the seventies after Richard Nixon tried to pull this off and Ah clarified, no, we think the Constitution says that, like, you absolutely cannot do that, and then it would probably also take a Supreme Court challenge because not only is there this law, and the law at its most basic says it's called the Impolment Control active nineteen seventy four,
and it clarifies that the president can't just kill programs he opposes or are exceptions, but it clarifies that we beleep. The Constitution says you can't do that. But also this is a really radical reading of the Constitution, and so there would probably be a court challenge. There would probably be multiple federal court challenges if they tried to defund certain programs using impoundment, and you know, it would probably
ultimately wind up at the Supreme Court. And just a note too on overturning this Impoundment Control Act, they're essentially asking Congress to give up one of their very core duties.
And I think that's really important to emphasize. I mean, you talked about some of Trump's planned nominations for his cabinet that are now facing trouble, and I think it's really important to understand that doing this this would really take Congress just sort of rolling over and giving Trump exactly what he wants, and that that is a real
step here and a real open question. Trump has said he wants to see the Senate go into recess so he can make recess appointments and his various nominations don't have to face public scrutiny. And so far senators have said, we're not really interested in giving up one of our horror jobs here. And so I think it's really important to think about, you know, there are actors here who are going to face choices if he tries to pick this fite over impoundments.
Yeah, Trump again and again comes back to the Nixon playbook. Right, he did this in his first administration. He's trying to undermine some of the legal anti corruption stuff put in after Nixon. Like, we really do see how democracy could have gone off the rails after Nixon. But there were Republicans who weren't complete partisans.
Now that is not the case.
One of the things that I struck by is that there's a lot of use of these unusual or just sort of not typical, you know, things that are not you know, haven't been used in a long time, like the Comstock Act or the Alien Enemies Act, things that were not repealed but really are not in practice, and then also sort of taking away acts like this act. So talk to me about this sort of weird way they're going through legislation and picking and choosing.
Yeah, so, okay, some of the history here, there are some historical examples of presidents saying I'm not going to spend the money that Congress appropriated for this program.
Ooh, excellent, tell me.
Yeah, you know, I had to learn about gunboats on the Mississippi for this story. And this is sort of like the original or example for constitutional scholars who are into this debate. Thomas Jefferson eighteen oh three said he was not going to spend some money that Congress appropriated
to place gunboats on the Mississippi River. And the debate over this is the law in the text of the law itself said we're giving you money for no more than fifteen gun boats and no more than fifty thousand dollars.
And what that meant was Jefferson essentially had discretion to decide whether or not this money was necessary to spend, and that was written down in the text of the law, and he said, I don't think this is necessary, and those are the kinds of examples you see throughout history is presidents taking these like really narrow exceptions that Congress actually allowed them to make. You know, Congress said like, hey,
they're almost all in the military context. So Congress is essentially saying like, hey, we understand this is a military situation. Things shift rapidly on the ground, more rapidly than we Congress can respond to, and so we're giving you, like we're actually writing down that you do have the option.
And so throughout history, when you see presidents exercising their impoundment ability or claiming they have that ability, it's usually in that context, and sometimes they get challenged and sometimes they back down. What Nixon did was take this theory to a new extreme and tried to use the concept of that he had this impoundment power to gut billions of dollars from programs he simply didn't like water treatment, drug rehabilitation programs, and local communities disaster relief for farmers.
He thought this was wasteful spending. But in these budget bills, Congress never said, hey, up to you. These standard appropriations that Congress was making for programs that they had a baited felt represented their constituents and Nixon just didn't like them. Organizations and programs took Nixon took court about a half dozen federal judges rules that just on the text of
the law, you can't do this. The Supreme Court ultimately waited, and not on the constitutional issue of when he could do this, but again reading the text of the law and saying, no, these laws don't give you the flexibility to cut these programs. So he lost almost across the board in federal court when these were decided on the merits. And then also Congress stepped in to pass a law after Watergate saying just to clarify, you cannot do that.
That's sort of where we are. And since then generally presidents have understood, like, I don't get a line item veido when they've sort of tried again and they've gotten shot down in various contexts. And that's the fight that Trump wants to pick. One way he wants to do that is through Listeners are probably familiar with the Vidic Gramaswami and Elon Musk committee that's going to propose about two trillion in cuts, they say, doze or the Department
of Government Efficiency. There are lots of tools that they could use to try to those cuts. But this is one of the ones that they have talked about. They've talked about sort of being the Supreme Court last case. In a recent Wall Street Journal op ed.
Yeah, it strikes me that it seems like the crew addoge wants to work with the sort of heritage crew, the Russ spot at omb that these are two separate groups that have interest that collide. Is there more connection here than we're seeing.
Yeah, this idea, this impoundment idea, comes from a man who you and I have talked about poor named Russ Vote. He was the Office of Management and Budget director in Trump's first term, and that is the office that that has that power I was talking about earlier to sort of decide, Okay, Congress wrote us the check, how do we get the money out the door in a way that aligns with our politics, our ideology. That's essentially what the Office of Management and Budget does under any president.
They're the gatekeeper for the flow of money, and it's a political appointment, so you can make political decisions about it to some extent. So after the first Trump administration, he found a think tank that really tried to spread this idea, but Vote, who Trump has now said he wants in this role again in his second administration. He is really skilled at finding other ways that don't pick this high level impoundment fight to control the flow of
money in a way that achieves the MAGA goals. And you know, that's something that Muska and Ramaswami have also talked about, that they don't want to just use this impoundment power. They want to change the classification for lots
of civil servants. This is another idea that Vote and his think tank, which is called the Center for Anew in America, that they've popularized that Trump can reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants so that they can be fired more easily to schedule effs, and Vote was instrumental and putting that partially in place at the very very
tail end of the Trump administration for his department. The Biden administration rolled that back, but there are all signals that when the Trump administration gets into office again that they are going to reinstate that they're going to reinstate
that for a really broad class of civil servants. Fifty thousand is a number that gets thrown around a lot, and so that's another way that they can cut the budget, not only through you know, those civil servants salaries, but the programs they oversee, the things that they execute exactly.
This is like one of these things where it seems like it's going to be very hard for them to do this, But it also seems like these are the smartest people in Trump world. Not Elon or Leon as Trump calls him in vague but vaugh seems very very smart. And so I'm wondering, you just talked to me through the legal challenges that this would would hit, but like, politically, don't you think this is going to be hard for them?
I think it will be very difficult for them. Part of the way that I predict, based on the first Trump administration, they will try to get around that difficulty is that even impoundment, if they choose not to pick the fight very publicly, can be done subtly or secretly, or moves that achieve the same thing as impoundment without being technically impoundment, that achieve the goal of we just don't want to spend this federal money for you know,
whatever reason. That can be done very quietly and subtly. The federal government is big, dense. The number of people who like understand what technical impoundment looks like, what a change and a grant rule looks like. That is achieving a political goal. It's small, it's technical. It's annoying to
figure out. I mean, the best example we have of Trump using his impoundment powers or trying to is at the end of his first term when he held up about four hundred million dollars in military aid to Ukraine.
Yeah.
Yeah, as a way to try to pressure President Zelenski and opening your corruption Investigationiden, right, Yeah, part of that money, not all four hundred million. But a US Government Accountability office later ruled that that violated the Impoundment Control Act, the seventy four Nixon Law, and that only came to
light because of whistleblowers. Some of it was reported at the time, but sort of the extent and the ask, the corrupt ask involved the fact that it was for ideological reasons, not for you know, oh, technically we feel we don't need to spend this money reasons. Part of that came to light through a whistleblower, and so you know, even that it took time, it took investigation to establish
that that's what was going on here. And in the meantime, Trump has lots of other lovers that he legally can pull to just not spend money or maybe arguably legally. One example somebody pointed out to me is after some really devastating wildfires in California and Washington during his term, Trump just refused to sign Master deck Work.
Right I remember this, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like in one case, indefinitely. In one case he eventually did do it, but that's because he didn't want to unlock federal relief aid for states that hadn't voted for him. And that is a power that the president has whether or not to sign a federal disaster declaration, and it unlocks about of money if he does, so, you know, those are there's a huge range of things he can do to simply stop money going out the door. And
it's going to you know, it's complicated, it's subtle. It's going to take investigation to find out.
That is wild. I mean, I shouldn't say wild.
It's really really insane and scary and also just something that we need to be doggedly following.
I really appreciate you, Molly, thanks so much.
For having me.
No moment full Jesse Cannon.
Oh Molly, there's going to be so much more. This isn't there So a court and Idaho has ruled that they can ban interstate abortion travel for minors. What are you seeing here?
We know this was coming right.
This is the thing where Trump said he wasn't going to ban abortion on a federal level, and then here we are with these little kind of chip away on abortion. So here is another idea here that Idaho wants to keep minors from being able to travel for an abortion.
This is not okay.
It supposedly states rights that now you can't travel to a different state. I mean, it's just this is where this is all going. This is all going to a federal band. This is all going to you know, women having less and less rights. The Idaho Attorney General, a vocal opponent of abortion, called the ruling a tremendous victory. Stay tuned for more dystopia. That's it for this episode
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