July 26, 2025

Jul 27, 2025

Ten days ago, ten Republican senators wrote to Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, asking him to release the funds Congress appropriated in March to support education. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which claims the federal government has been taken over by a radical left cabal and calls for the decimation of that government in favor of state power, enabling the construction of a religious government.

Vought was central to the cuts made by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and has recently pushed Congress to put its stamp of approval on $9.4 billion of those cuts. Over the objections of Democrats, Republicans agreed earlier this month to approve cuts the administration made to laws passed by Congress, known as "rescissions,” for the first time in decades. Trump signed that measure into law on Thursday.

The Constitution charges the president with making sure the laws passed by Congress are “faithfully executed,” and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits the executive branch from withholding funds appropriated by Congress, leading lawmakers to object that the Trump administration is breaking the law and trying to take over Congress’s job of writing laws. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said of the rescission package: “Let's not make a habit of this. Let’s not consider this a precedent.” But Vought says those cuts are just the beginning.

In March, Congress approved nearly $7 billion in education funding that was supposed to be released by July 1, but the administration announced on June 30 it would not do so, saying officials were conducting a “review.” The funds included money to recruit and train teachers and to support arts and music education in low-income areas, as well as funds for children learning English and for the children of migrant farm workers. New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh noted that the Office of Management and Budget said federal dollars were being “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda.”

“We share your concern about taxpayer money going to fund radical left-wing programs,” the senators wrote to Vought, but “we do not believe that is happening with these funds.”

Also yesterday, Senator Katie Britt (R-AL), who chairs the Senate Appropriations homeland subcommittee, and thirteen of her Republican colleagues wrote a letter to Vought urging him to “fully implement” the government funding measure Congress passed in March, releasing money for programs funded by the National Institutes of Health. The letter clarified that its authors shared Vought’s “commitment to ensuring NIH funds are used responsibly and not diverted to ideological or unaccountable programs.” But, it warned, “Suspension of these appropriated funds—whether formally withheld or functionally delayed—could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science.”

As Trump’s popularity falls, Republican lawmakers are having to confront the reality that the Project 2025 program the administration is putting into place is deeply unpopular not just with Democrats and Independents but also with Republicans. They appear to be trying desperately to shore up some of the damage the administration has done. And the White House seems to be concerned enough about the 2026 midterms that it’s listening. Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would release more than $5 billion in funding it had withheld from public schools.

The release of money before the start of the school year will help to hide from voters how the administration’s decisions are affecting their everyday lives, a helpful reprieve as the administration continues to stonewall over the files of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Still refusing to entertain the idea of releasing the files themselves, administration officials have now met twice with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children. Trump’s former attorney Todd Blanche is representing the Department of Justice (DOJ). He wrote: “President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence. If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”

Interviewing Maxwell, who is fishing for a reduction in her 20-year sentence, is unlikely to be a convincing substitute for the files themselves, especially since we now know Trump is mentioned in the files and lied that Attorney General Pam Bondi had not given him that information.

The circumstances around the talks also seem fishy. Alan Feuer of the New York Times reports that Blanche is a personal friend of Maxwell’s lawyer David O. Markus. Feuer also noted that Blanche has taken the lead in the discussions since the department fired Maurene Comey, who prosecuted the cases of both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell herself is a problematic witness: in 2020, during Trump’s first administration, the Justice Department charged her with two counts of perjury in addition to the charges of sexually grooming children and sex trafficking. As CNN’s Aaron Blake pointed out today, in filing the charges, the Justice Department said that her lies “should give the Court serious pause” about trusting her and that her “willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct…strongly suggests her true motive has been and remains to avoid being held accountable for her crimes.”

Yesterday Trump appeared to dangle a pardon over Maxwell when he pointed out to reporters that he’s “allowed” to pardon her.

As Republicans note Trump’s weakening power, elected officials appear to be pushing for rollbacks of his policies. At the same time, his appointees are pushing to put as much of their agenda into operation as they can, while they can.

Liz Essley Whyte reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to remove all sixteen members of a task force that advises the federal government on what preventative health care measures—things like cancer screenings—health insurers must cover. Whyte explains that the people currently on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force have medical expertise, are vetted to make sure they don’t have conflicts of interest, and use the latest scientific evidence to determine which interventions work.

In June, Kennedy replaced all seventeen of the members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with seven people who share Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines. They announced that they would reexamine the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule for children and adults.

Hannah Natanson, Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Siegel of the Washington Post reported today that staff associated with the “Department of Government Efficiency” are using artificial intelligence to eliminate half of the government’s regulations by next January. James Burnham, former chief attorney for DOGE, told the reporters: “Creative deployment of artificial intelligence to advance the president’s regulatory agenda is one logical strategy to make significant progress” during Trump’s term.

Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, announced yesterday that it is starting a “detention support grant program” to fund temporary detention facilities. States have until August 8 to apply for grants from a pot of $608 million. FEMA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will distribute the funds.

There appears to be pushback against some of the extremes of the administration’s appointees. Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported today that senior military officers are increasingly at odds with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has been rocky, as most of his staff have either resigned or been fired and have not been replaced, and as he uploaded classified information about military strikes to a private Signal chat on which a reporter had been included.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), whose support for Hegseth earned him Senate confirmation, recently told CNN: “With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization.”

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Notes:

https://www.capito.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_director_vought.pdf

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/25/britt-leads-letter-urging-trump-administration-to-release-delayed-nih-funds-00476872

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-signs-rescissions-package-foreign-aid-npr-pbs-funding/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/15/senate-republicans-trump-rescissions-bill/

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/monitor_breakfast/2025/0717/russell-vought-trump-congress-budget

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/us/education-funds-released-white-house.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/us/politics/todd-blanche-epstein-ghislaine-maxwell-trump.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/07/25/trump-says-hes-allowed-to-pardon-ghislaine-maxwell-amid-epstein-files-controversy/

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-sentenced-20-years-prison-conspiring-jeffrey-epstein-sexually-abuse

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/politics/ghislaine-maxwell-trump-epstein-doj