Today Money Trail is debuting a weekly roundup of some of the more consequential—but less-noted—stories coming out of Washington that our readers may have missed. Our correspondent, Randy Rieland—a former Smithsonian magazine columnist, Discovery Channel website director, and Washingtonian senior writer—has been living in the nation’s capital for 40 years and has developed a healthy skepticism of what passes there as normal.
The Incredible, Shrinking HHS
It looks like things are going to get even uglier at the Department of Health and Human Services. Already the agency is down 20,000 employees since Donald Trump took office. Now, an internal memo obtained by the Washington Post recommends a potential budget cut of $40 billion, or about one-third of the agency’s discretionary income. This is a budget request from the White House, and based on past performance, it’s not likely to get much resistance from Republicans in Congress.
The National Institutes of Health would take a particularly big hit—roughly 40 percent from $47 billion to $27 billion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would also get hammered. The memo calls for its budget to be slashed from $9.2 billion to $5.2 billion, a cut of 44 percent. The proposal would eliminate all the agency’s chronic disease programs, which focus on heart disease, obesity, diabetes and smoking cessation. Ironically, many of the cutbacks would occur to disease and injury-prevention initiatives, the sort of programs that seemed to be a priority of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says he wants to make America healthy again.
Also at risk, based on the memo, is funding that supports health care in rural communities as well as Head Start, which for 60 years has provided early child care and education for low-income families.
A Legal Cage Match
This is getting real. Soon we will know whether the president, who has already subjugated Congress, will blow off pointy-headed jurists who go on about a “constitutional crisis,” which, in Trump World, is seen as more of a cage match.
On Wednesday, Judge James Boasberg, chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington, threatened to begin criminal contempt proceedings against the Trump administration unless it addresses an order he issued last month regarding the shipping of several planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador.
While government services for U.S. citizens are being slashed dramatically, and Elon Musk and the DOGE bros have essentially eliminated USAID, which funded health programs around the world, the State Department is paying El Salvador $6 million to keep deported immigrants in a maximum security prison that looks more like a concentration camp.
A quick refresher: Rolling out the rarely used Alien Enemies Act—the Venezuelans were portrayed as part of an invasion—the administration packed them on the planes to carry out a no-muss, no-fuss mass deportation. Judge Boasberg tried to intercede, pointing out that we do have a legal process for this sort of thing, but soon the prison planes were wheels up anyway.
That prompted an “Oopsie, too late” tweet from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a slice of snark reposted by no one other than Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump followed up by calling for Boasberg’s impeachment, to which Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts responded with a legalese version of “Don’t go there.”
Now, Boasberg has raised the stakes, calling for a formal review of how and why the administration ignored his order. “The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” he wrote in Wednesday’s ruling.
Fed Up with the Fed
I’m shocked! Shocked! Who could have imagined that the president would go ALL CAPS irate after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said he couldn’t see the Fed lowering interest rates any time soon?
Ah, just about everybody.
While speaking to the Economic Club of Chicago on Wednesday, Powell said the tariff blast the White House triggered on Trump’s “Liberation Day” is likely to cause higher prices and slower economic growth.
The stock market tanked, and early Thursday Trump turned to his weapon of choice, Truth Social. He pointed out that the European Central Bank is preparing to lower interest rates (but the EU hasn’t imposed tariffs on most of the countries in the world) and that the cost of groceries has gone down. (It hasn’t).
Then he took aim at Powell. who Trump appointed during his first term, complaining that he is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG.” He signed off his rant with the touching sentiment that Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough.” Trump piled on later, telling reporters in the Oval Office: “He’ll be out of there real fast. Believe me.”
Powell, whose term as Fed chair ends in May 2026, isn’t so sure. In the past, when he’s come under fire from the president, he has noted that since the Fed was established as an independent agency, he can only be fired “for cause,” not as a result of political differences. That apparent protection was established by a 1935 Supreme Court ruling.
But Trump has already fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, which also is an independent federal agency. They have sued the administration, and it’s likely yet another Trump power move that will end up before the Supreme Court.
Deep Freeze on Campus
The White House’s War on Colleges is also ratcheting up. It has now threatened to withhold federal grants from seven schools—Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton and U Penn. Earlier this week, after the president, on Truth Social, described Harvard as a “JOKE” that teaches “Hate and Stupidity,” the Internal Revenue Service announced that it is seriously considering taking away the university’s tax exempt status, an exemption granted to most public and private colleges as non-profit organizations. This came after the administration announced that it was freezing $2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard. The university’s seeming transgression is that it pushed back against a list of demands sent by the White House. The demands included the usual dictates about dealing with antisemitism on campus and spurning the dreaded diversity, equity and inclusion criteria in its hiring and admissions practices. But the administration went a step further, requiring Harvard to do an audit to ensure “viewpoint diversity.” Right, it used the D word.
Details, Details
Given that one of the stated goals of Trump’s tariff strategy is to bring back manufacturing, consider this finding from a survey by Republican pollster Frank Luntz: While 80 percent of those surveyed think the United States would be better off if more Americans worked in factories, only 25 percent believe they personally would be better off with a factory job.
 |
|