The Trump administration’s order to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans prompted confusion across state capitols and local government offices on Tuesday, leaving them at a loss on how to even calculate its impact.
Officials got a temporary reprieve late in the day when a federal judge in the District of Columbia blocked the order just as it was set to go into effect. But a variety of programs had already reported seeing funds cut off by then, leaving both Republican- and Democratic-led states uncertain about the future of their housing services, health care programs and everything in between.
“This is creating chaos,” Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona, a Democrat, said in a statement before the court’s intervention.
For much of Tuesday, the lack of detail in the brief memo issued by the White House budget office a day earlier had left local budget offices and elected officials unable to even describe what immediate effect it would have. In Oklahoma, a spokesman for the mayor of Oklahoma City declined to comment, citing the need for greater clarity on what the order actually entailed.
But the memo made clear the political aims of the Trump administration — criticizing the use of federal resources to “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies” — and it was welcomed by some Republican leaders, like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas.
“The state of Texas fully supports President Trump’s efforts to cut waste, fraud and abuse, and eliminate funding for D.E.I. and radical gender ideology initiatives,” said Andrew Mahaleris, Mr. Abbott’s press secretary. “This pause in funding will bring transparency to federal spending and is long overdue.”
Democratic officials, by contrast, expressed alarm at states losing access on Tuesday to an online portal through which state Medicaid departments receive federal funding, and the possibility of losing funds for emergency services.
In Colorado, the pause in spending could “wreak havoc” on fire and police departments, said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat. Representative Laura Gillen, Democrat of New York, who represents part of Long Island, said the freeze would jeopardize “the safety of our communities and our law enforcement officers.”
Nonprofit groups in New York said they had already received emails from their federal contacts telling them that their contracts had been paused.
“President Trump is leaving states out in the cold without any guidance or explanation,” said Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat and former vice-presidential candidate. Under a continuing funding freeze, he said, Minnesota would be dealing with a $2 billion hole in the state budget each month.
Even Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a hard-line conservative Republican and prominent Trump ally, signaled concern about the abrupt freeze, reflecting the extent of the sudden challenge to states.
In a joint statement with top Louisiana officials, Governor Landry asked the Trump administration “to develop a responsible runway to untangle us from any unnecessary and egregious policies without jeopardizing the financial stability of the state.”
In a separate memo issued on Tuesday afternoon, the White House budget office tried to address concerns about the scope of the pause in federal dollars, saying that it applied only to programs “implicated by” President Trump’s recent executive orders, which have sought to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and climate initiatives, among other things.
That suggested that money could continue flowing to services not related to those orders.
But officials and nonprofits that receive federal grants were left to discover the contours of the cutoff themselves, in some cases finding that a source of key funding had suddenly dried up.
When staff members at a Phoenix charity group for homeless people tried to log into a federal payment system to withdraw $62,000 for their January payroll and other expenses, they found it locked on Tuesday.
“No one could get in,” said Amy Schwabenlender, the chief executive of Keys to Change, which receives a $900,000 annual grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s ridiculous. You’re unraveling things with no notice. You’re stopping things that were running to help people.”
Even as Governor Abbott applauded the president’s order, other officials in Texas were racing to get a handle on all the ways in which federal dollars flowed into local government services, and which of those dollars would be potentially cut off.
The state’s health agencies received nearly $30 billion from the federal government in the last fiscal year, more than half of its funding. By some estimates, more than 20,000 teaching positions across Texas could be lost without Title I, which provides federal funding to schools that have large numbers of low-income students.
“A number of our major city departments are either fully funded or significantly funded with federal grant dollars, that includes our health department and the city’s housing department,” said Christopher Hollins, the Houston controller and a Democrat.
“Will people who get housing vouchers have somewhere to live next month?” Mr. Hollins asked. “We don’t know the answer to that.”
In California, public transit agencies were left wondering what might happen to the huge federal promises for large-scale infrastructure projects.
The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District is awaiting a $400 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration to complete a seismic retrofit of one of the world’s most recognizable bridges.
“Like every other transportation agency in the country, we’re monitoring this temporary pause,” said Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, a spokesman for the bridge district.
The San Francisco ferry system and port were also recently told to expect $55 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to complete the country’s first high-speed, zero-emission ferry network — an initiative that could be on the losing end of Mr. Trump’s determination to end “green new deal” projects.
But even that was unclear.
Dr. Theresa Cullen, the director of the Pima County Health Department in Tucson, Ariz., said her agency had already stopped making new purchases. She said the freeze would jeopardize breast cancer screenings; H.I.V. prevention; efforts to track a rash of tuberculosis cases; and the distribution of Narcan, the overdose-reversal drug, to prevent opioid deaths.
“Today they will be OK,” she said. “I don’t know about next week.”
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