The Chaos Is the Point

You are not supposed to understand what is going on right now.

Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

There is an ongoing, dire political crisis playing out in Washington over the future of trillions of dollars of federal funding. I wish I could be more specific than that, but I don’t fully understand it. Neither, it seems, does anyone else.

On Monday, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo that, by some interpretations, basically froze all federal funding to… well, maybe everything? And maybe only some things. Per the Washington Post on Monday:

In a two-page document, Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, instructs federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.” The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, also calls for each agency to perform a “comprehensive analysis” to ensure its grant and loan programs are consistent with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, which aimed to ban federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and limit clean energy spending, among other measures.

The memo, which goes into effect Tuesday, states its orders should not be “construed” to affect Social Security or Medicare recipients, and also says the federal financial assistance put on hold “does not include assistance provided directly to individuals.”

What does this mean? We don’t really know. A few minutes after I pitched this blog to Jack M., the OMB issued a second memo, rescinding the first memo but not, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the Administration’s larger efforts to block government spending. What does that mean? I also do not know. I don’t know anything. If you want clarity in that regard you have come to the wrong blog.

What is clear to me is that the chaos here is part of the point. You are not supposed to understand what is going on. You are not supposed to trust the government.

The Trump administration’s claim, broadly, is that they will sweep in and end all the frivolous government spending that is making peoples’ lives bad, and if some of that work accidentally makes peoples’ lives worse, well then that was actually Joe Biden’s fault and this plan will be better, just wait and see. Are the hundreds of thousands of mosquito nets and vitamin A doses that USAID and its dozens of subcontractors and nonprofits were distributing all over the developing world going to get where they’re supposed to go? Do the billions of dollars of federal grants that fund cancer research and academic work and entire swathes of state budgets still exist? Does Medicaid still exist? I don’t know. There are a bunch of early 20s Elon Musk acolytes reportedly running riot in the Office of Personnel Management and nobody is entirely sure what they’re doing or what they’re actually allowed to do. All of this is perhaps illegal, at least if we’re going by the largely opaque laws that govern the internal machinations of our government — which we might not be, because who knows if those exist. It is chaos. It will turn into pain. That is the point.

What Trump is doing is throwing very dangerous spaghetti at the walls of American society and seeing what fucks up those walls. (In this metaphor the spaghetti is very hard, I guess.) There is a very clear thing that will follow: something will have to fill the cracks. That something will be Capital.

In the short term, the administration’s chaotic policies are going to make the economy screwy and ruin thousands of lives. In the long term, though, we already know who wins. If a freeze on federal funding means, for example, that the state of Louisiana’s health department cannot pay any of its staff and ends all of its programs, first, thousands of people will go without care or die or end up in drastically worse situations than they were. But I’m sure that will be, in some ways, temporary. Where there is demand there will be a supplier. A startup or private corporation will take on the heroic role of providing health services for the state of Louisiana — maybe, at the small fee of slightly less federal money than the original funding was in the first place. See? Trump is saving the country money already. And now, that money’s not even going to the state of Lousiana! It’s going to LoveLouisianaCorp, a subsidiary company set up by the fine American folks over at MetaAmazonXCorp to meet the need for essential services in a deserving state of brave patriots. Will those services be worse than the ones formerly provided by the wasteful and inefficient Louisiana Department of Health? Well, not if you ask the kind folks at LoveLouisianaCorp’s local news outlet, LoveLouisiana dot com, which focuses on bringing you the most positive stories of LoveLouisiana’s impact in the communities it serves.

This aside is fiction, of course, for now. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. But you can see where this goes. Everything is unclear and messed up and tied up in legal paperwork and falling apart. It looks like chaos. But there is a plan — there is always a plan. The people making it are the ones who are going to get rich. They are going to convince people that the government (the bad kind of government) cannot help them, and that the government (the good kind, with Trump and Freedom) will help them by connecting them with suppliers that can do the (bad) government’s job better. Will those suppliers be owned by people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? Well — we’ll just have to wait and see. In times of turmoil, it’s always a safe bet that the guys who just bought the government are going to come out on top.