The Post has a good piece up about all the hidden ways the Trump White House is trying to break different parts of the government — through non-payment of grants (different from cancelations), arbitrary limits on purchase authority, etc. They note something very similar to the funds-ghosting I’ve reported on at the National Institutes of Health, only here with the EPA.
Here’s the key passage that TPM Reader SS flagged to my attention …
Asked for comment, EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said in an email: “No ORD funding requests to OMS have been denied. At ORD and throughout the agency, EPA is continuing research and labs to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
The three ORD employees said that while no office funding requests have been denied, many requests have not been approved.
“We’ve sent multiple requests for new expenses to them, and they just sit on them,” one of the staffers said. “But they never officially cancel or deny anything. It’s like a pocket veto.”
Pretty clear modus operandi: don’t cancel anything, just stop paying and refuse to offer any explanation. So you create confusion and if people are confused there’s no cancelation to point to. So you kill the programs on the vine without leaving a lot of finger prints.
It so happens that I learned of another example of this happening at EPA just today, quite separate from this example from the Post. So this is clearly pervasive. And we can now add the EPA to the NIH as example points of this.
That still leaves the question of why? Why not just cancel the grants? I suspect it’s because these are both cases where they have at least some fear of blowback for asphyxiating the programs and they’re also trying to accumulate surpluses so they can come in with rescission bills at the end of the summer. I continue to think that the politics of this are far worse for the White House than folks on either side seem to think. But these are really still suppositions as to the “why.” For the moment, we can just say that the same funds-ghosting is happening at another agency.
