The Washington Post has a lengthy new report about how President Donald Trump and his administration sparked mass chaos earlier this week when they issued a memo freezing all federal grants and loans.
The memo itself was so broadly written that it resulted in the shutdown of Medicaid portals in all 50 states and also put funding to key programs such as Head Start in jeopardy.
Now that the memo has been rescinded, some White House staffers are acknowledging to the Post that it was a mistake to publish.
“The memo was poorly written and gave people the impression it was taking action it was not,” said one source. “It did not go through the proper approval process.”
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In fact, two of the Post's sources say that the memo was not reviewed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller or anyone on his team before it went live.
The Post also quotes Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) who said that the order left people in her state scrambling, and also criticized the current structure of the White House for not giving her a clear-cut contact person to address concerns about the order.
“There are still a lot of questions and I’m hearing a lot of anxiety from nonprofits in Maine that are concerned that their grants may be suspended or not forthcoming,” she said. “I don’t know whether this is at [Office of Management and Budget nominee Russell Vought’s] direction or [Elon] Musk’s direction or the acting director of OMB, I just don’t know. That’s one of the things I want to find out... because we don’t know who to go to for clarification."