Our conversations today are full of fairly moralizing claims about anticipatory obedience or obeying in advance. But much of what is happening is what I would classify as failures of imagination. They may have substantively the same effect, similar actions. But they’re different.
For instance, today FEMA rejected a request from Washington state for disaster relief funds for a cyclone that hit the state last fall. As these things go, the sums are relatively small — $34 million. But the flat rejection is almost unheard of, from my experience. Unheard of, but, given the players, totally predictable. At a minimum it’s immediately understandable. You know exactly why they rejected it. I’m not saying these rejections never happen. The governmental mores have changed in recent decades. Assenting to these requests is generally a matter of course and I suspect when there are disagreements it’s handled informally in a de facto negotiation. When it’s a major disaster and it’s a matter of billions it’s a different story. But from what I can tell here, FEMA just said: No. That disaster doesn’t count.
We’re already seeing signs of this across the federal government. With things that are at all discretionary, blue states are just out of luck. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson (D) said, “This is another troubling example of the federal government withholding funding.”
That’s it?
Washington plans to appeal the decision through FEMA’s appeal procedure.
I don’t want to be overly critical. There’s not a clear rulebook on how you deal with this. The state’s lawyers may be telling them that they need to exhaust the FEMA process before they can pursue relief through the courts, if they plan on doing that. Still, it seems pretty passive relative to the nature of the abuse of power.
Then there was another case.
In my next example, it’s a major public university, but one we haven’t heard much about, in the administration’s crosshairs. I was talking to a scholar there who had an NEH grant canceled. It’s quite a small one in the context of a big public university. There’s probably not much can be done. But what got my attention is that the university was approaching the issue as one might if there was a hold up or an issue with a particular grant — like in the old days. So find out what the issue is, talk to the grant officer, etc. But the NEH is being shut down. There’s no issue to work through.
Now, in some cases, DOGE terminations can be undone, if they’re embarrassing enough. DOGE originally canceled a bunch of contracts for VA suicide hotlines. I think most of those were reinstated, for obvious reasons. Just too horrifying even for DOGE and its defenders. But in this case the university had not appeared to have taken any official or even de facto recognition of what’s happening with these grants. At least in this one case it was as though the university is moving forward on autopilot as though it were still 2024.
I have no idea what the story is in that case. I doubt that anyone in any university in this country hasn’t heard of DOGE or, broadly speaking, what’s happening in DC. I guess it’s possible someone hasn’t heard what happened at NEH a few weeks ago. But someone in the humanities? Hard to figure.
At some level I wonder if it comes down to, what else are you going to do? Get together a few administrators and protest in front of DOGE’s offices next to the White House? If there’s nothing you can do anyway maybe you just default to reflexes. I don’t know. But I do think there’s something more general here.
We are still to a great degree in a space where the defenders haven’t reoriented themselves to deal with the new situation they are in. They’re still bewildered, literally disoriented. Meanwhile the offenders have been in the new system since January 20th, and even before.
