The Trump administration through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ordered a pause on federal funding to grants and loans. The pause was supposed to go into effect on Tuesday afternoon but a federal judge put a pause on that pause because several states sued to stop it.
Queue an online media freak out about how kids won’t get school lunches or homeless shelters won’t have food. That’s not true.
The president ordered a review of funding to non-government organizations (NGOs), foreign governments and large discretionary contracts. The order excludes direct aid and benefit programs like SNAP and it also makes it clear that this will not affect Medicaid or Social Security. The new White House launched an X account to handle all of this misreporting and clarification on what is and is not supposed to be paused can be found here.
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller calls the media fear about the pause the “first dumb media hoax of 2025.” It doesn’t help that the Medicaid website portal had an outage in the same day that this pause was announced. People justifiably freaked out that they would lose this benefit as a part of the spending pause. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the outage and “confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent.”
The federal judge’s pause only applies to existing programs, meaning they will still be funded. No new programs can be put into place, as directed by that pause.
