Swaths of U.S. Government Grind to a Halt After Trump Shock Therapy
Rescinded job offers, delayed health updates and confusion over cutting government checks upend business as usual across Washington
By Liz Essley Whyte and Scott Patterson
The gears of government slowed to a halt this week after President Trump axed major federal initiatives across Washington, causing even routine functions to hit the skids.
The Transportation Department temporarily shut down a computer system for road projects. Health agencies stopped virtually all external communications in a directive that risked silencing timely updates on infectious diseases. A hiring freeze left agencies wondering how parts of the government could adapt to new demands. Confusion loomed over how agencies should disburse funds allocated by the previous administration.
While glitches aren’t uncommon during the early days of presidential transitions, some longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the new one. The stalled initiatives extended far beyond Trump’s cancellation of federal DEI programs.
New leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services halted all external communications from the health agencies through Feb. 1. Food and Drug Administration employees scrambled to clarify that they could still issue critical safety alerts, while scientists said their grant-review meetings had been canceled, potentially endangering funding for their health research. National Institutes of Health scientists were also told to stop purchases of supplies, essentially bringing their research to a halt, two people familiar with the matter said.
The communications pause caught the attention of Congress, with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) urging Agriculture Department nominee Brooke Rollins to ask why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s messages to farmers on bird flu had been halted. “We’re concerned,” Klobuchar said.
A spokeswoman for the White House said that the communications pause didn’t relate to emergencies or critical health needs, and that food and safety inspections continued. She described the disruptions as temporary inconveniences.
CDC trackers on seasonal flu and bird flu hadn’t been updated, and the agency’s flagship weekly report, which has communicated public-health information for decades, wasn’t issued as normal on Thursday.
Staff in one CDC department has canceled a dozen work trips scheduled for the next two weeks, including travel to events that took months to plan, an official said. CDC has postponed several planned meetings with outside partners, including one on antimicrobial resistance, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The administration paused the communications in part to ensure that new missives aligned with Trump’s executive order declaring only two genders, people familiar with the matter said. The aim was to nix references to “pregnant people,” for example, rather than pregnant women. Such language, aimed at being inclusive, grew pervasive across healthcare in recent years and has drawn criticism.
Previous administrations also paused some external communications, but people with memory of them say those pauses were far less sweeping and didn’t affect such things as NIH grant meetings or routine CDC data updates.
Meetings to review potential NIH grants—the lifeblood of American science—were canceled. When the World Health Organization held a call to discuss the Marburg virus outbreak in Tanzania, leaders in the health-department division that prepares for pandemics told staff not to attend the call.
Some federal workplaces rescinded job offers to comply with a hiring freeze issued from the White House. That included the Department of Veterans Affairs’ hospitals and clinics, according to Jacqueline Simon of the American Federation of Government Employees labor union. The White House also directed two of its offices to come up with a plan to shrink the federal workforce.
The VA said it had issued some exemptions to the hiring freeze and would do whatever is necessary to provide veterans with benefits and services they earned.
The National Park Service employs thousands of seasonal employees each year. Two employees who had accepted offers as interpretive rangers at national parks, but who hadn’t yet started, said they received emails rescinding their offers. The emails, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, were sent from a government address.
Most agencies were under a hiring freeze that could last up to 90 days, but it could run longer at the Internal Revenue Service, even as the agency enters tax season and the period in which it normally hires many seasonal employees. Rather than the standard 90 days, the Trump order that freezes hiring said the Treasury Department must sign off before the IRS can hire again. The agency canceled a Thursday webinar to give résumé tips to potential applicants.
An IRS spokesman didn’t reply to an inquiry on social-media reports of the agency rescinding job offers.
“Freezing hiring at the IRS will severely impact the level of service,” said Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
Agencies were also struggling to understand a Trump executive order that paused the distribution of funds from former President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law and his 2022 climate law, people familiar with the matter said.
The order told agencies to review cash disbursements and submit reports on their status within 90 days. Many of those funds had been promised to companies through loan contracts, which are legally binding, experts said.
The order set off a wave of confusion about which funds needed to be halted. On Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo clarifying that the order only targets funds related to electric vehicles and some other clean-energy technologies. The memo states that agencies “may disburse funds as they deem necessary after consulting with the Office of Management and Budget.”
“Executive orders do not change underlying statutes, so if loans or grants have been awarded pursuant to a statute like IRA and funds have been appropriated, an executive order would have a hard time turning that back,” said Scott Segal, a partner at Bracewell, referring to the climate statute. Long delays “might have violated the law,” he said.
Billions of dollars have been disbursed to clean-energy projects through the Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure funds, but billions more remain unspent.
Companies that received loan commitments from the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which provides low-interest funds to clean-energy projects, were unsure about when they might receive their cash. Andy Marsh, chief executive of Plug Power, which makes green hydrogen, said he was confident the government would eventually honor its obligations. The loan office finalized a $1.66 billion loan to Plug Power in the final days of the Biden administration.
“Contracts, whether it’s with the government or a contract with another party, you have to live by the rules of the contract,” he said.
The spending guidance also sparked chaos at the Transportation Department, said Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington think tank. Soon after the executive order circulated, the Federal Highway Administration shut down its computer system that helped state officials manage federal funds for road projects due to the executive order, he said.
“I started to get panicked texts from people at the [Transportation Department] saying we’re shutting down our systems,” he said. After the OMB circulated its memo, the systems were turned back on.
Koenraad Van Doorslaer, a virologist at the University of Arizona, was due to attend an NIH training session Thursday ahead of reviewing grant applications from scientists studying oral cancers. That meeting was canceled on Wednesday.
If a pending grant application doesn’t get reviewed, Van Doorslaer said, “I won’t get money in my account, I can’t pay myself, I can’t pay anyone in my lab, I may have to close down the lab.”
Jeremy Berg, who was director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH when President Barack Obama took office, said grant meetings typically continue through a presidential transition, so the current situation is unusual.
In fiscal year 2023, NIH reviewed nearly 52,000 grant applications and funded 21% of those. About 83% of NIH’s $48 billion budget goes to scientists outside NIH labs through such grants.
“If that gets delayed by more than a few weeks or more, then everything in the whole system needs to get rejiggered to make it work,” Berg said.
Kristina Peterson, Nidhi Subbaraman, Betsy McKay, Laura Kusisto, Dominique Mosbergen, Lindsay Ellis and Allison Pohle contributed to this article.
Write to Liz Essley Whyte at liz.whyte@wsj.com and Scott Patterson at scott.patterson@wsj.com