Move fast and break things
There's a reason you don't run the US government like a startup
According to the US Constitution, our government was created “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty….” The dean of my public affairs grad program used to say that we often don’t like how slowly our bureaucracy moves, but it gets a lot of services to people who need them. In contrast, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress, says, “All pedal, no brake. Drive it. Drive it. Drive it…. When you’ve got this kind of momentum, you do not stop, you do not think. You go, you go, you go,” of the administration’s new “flood the zone” strategy as reported in the NYT.
If you haven’t been paying attention, there has indeed been a flood of executive orders by the new administration. In an effort to be of service to those of you who don’t speak the Federal alphabet soup, and in an effort to quell my rising anxieties, I feel compelled to decode what these orders will mean for health and wellness based on my former experience with the oversight agency for the Federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). So I’ll try to address them one at a time according to where I’m hearing the most confusion.
Yesterday, I heard from a whole lot of nonprofit folks on social who were worried about their funding, particularly those working in mental health. On January 27, OMB issued guidance requesting that agencies temporarily pause all “all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities” that are implicated by the President’s Executive Orders, including seven specific orders generally aimed at removing “woke ideology” from the Federal government. A follow-up memo from OMB clarifies that programs and projects that involve diversity and inclusion efforts or acknowledge climate change, or “funding nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest” are on the chopping block.
A federal judge very temporarily stopped this halt in funding from going into effect, and several court challenges to the spending memo followed. And as I was editing this piece yesterday, the administration rescinded the original memo to freeze funds. But it asserted that its efforts to review funding to eliminate DEI and climate resilience efforts will continue.
Theoretically, the President should not be able to cease funds approved by Congress–the legislative branch holds the power of the purse. In practice, mandatory spending (Medicare, the Federal health insurance program which covers those over 65 and those with certain disabilities such as End Stage Renal Disease, and Medicaid, the Federal-State joint program covering low income children, pregnant women, parents, elderly and disabled people) should be “safer” from Trump’s whims than discretionary spending, which is basically everything else at HHS.
That OMB clarification memo stated that mandatory programs like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP is not an HHS program; it’s US Department of Agriculture) would not be paused, and that programs that provide “direct benefits” to Americans like Head Start (discretionary HHS program through the Administration on Children and Families that provides child care, health screenings, and promotes well-being for low income families) are excluded. However, awardees were locked out of their Payment Management Services portal for programs like Medicaid and Head Start when the funding cessation order was originally scheduled to go into effect Tuesday evening, which the White House is now blaming on an unrelated temporary outage; awardees have since regained access.
So, what I’m reading between the lines here as the best case scenario is that legal battles will reduce the speed with which the funding for this fiscal year will be upended by the recent barrage of anti-woke executive memos. That’s not a given, again, it’s a best case scenario. But, if you have funding via a discretionary program (yep, anything that’s not Medicare or Medicaid from HHS–read NIH, SAMHSA, CDC, etc.), that includes any preferences for folks who are women, racial or ethnic minorities, disabled, LGBTQIA+, or otherwise underserved, you might do well to start looking for other (private, State, or local) support for the coming fiscal years. I hope your organization survives this one.
If the administration’s new strategy adversely impacts the people you love and serve, please let your elected officials know. I just downloaded the 5 Calls app to streamline my daily efforts. Also, be sure to let your friends and family know. Plenty of folks just aren’t paying attention, and others are reveling in the idea of cutting wasteful woke spending.
I am all for making our government more efficient and effective, and devoted about a decade of my life to that effort (more on fraud, waste, and abuse soon). I’ve also served as a mentor to healthcare startups and I enjoy helping ambitious companies do more faster (cheers to techstars). But while the “move fast and break things” strategy might work for Zuck, it doesn’t work for the Federal government. As we saw last night, it can result in tragedy. Not the kind where your investors lose some money, but where your citizens lose their lives.
A week after Trump eliminated the Aviation Security Advisory Committee membership and fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, and days after the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) resigned after repeated attacks from Musk, the US experienced the most deadly commercial plane crash in 25 years.
Trump himself said this was a clear night, the Army helicopter should have seen the plane, and this shouldn’t have happened; the air traffic controllers asked the helicopter to confirm they saw the plane shortly before the crash; the pilots of both aircraft were reportedly experienced. We may never know what exactly caused this tragedy, but Trump is already suggesting it was DEI efforts from previous administrations. I’m very interested to hear more about that.
What I know for sure is that with several leadership vacancies at the FAA and other agencies, and purposeful chaos as a strategy to gut the civil service, more things are bound to break. I hope no more lives are lost to this unprecedented “flood the zone” strategy. My sincere condolences to the families of all of the victims and gratitude for the first responders and those who continue with recovery and investigative efforts.