WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s first week in office was a blitz of executive orders and memos — some important, others little more than press releases on fancy letterhead — designed to overwhelm Washington into submission.
Week Two showed Trump’s maximalist second-term instincts were more than just an opening bid. It revealed how the president many Americans grew to distrust in his first term — erratic, chaotic, and unwilling or unable to focus on uniting the country rather than dividing it — has not really gone anywhere.
The result, for many Trump critics in Washington, is a mixture of fear and hope: worries about purges of the civil service and unconstitutional power grabs by Trump, mixed with a revival of hopes that Democrats can fight a president who’s proven more effective at blustering than taking real action.
Trump, who has largely shed the illusion he is not attempting to implement large chunks of the Project 2025 agenda, is unlikely to let up. And unlike in early 2017, Trump and his core allies are more familiar with the federal government and how to bend it to their will.
“It’s vastly different. There’s a level of preparedness and focus that frankly we didn’t have last time,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary. “The four years out of office have really allowed the president to think about the people he wants to surround himself with, the people he wants to stay away from, the policies he wants to pursue and the process by which he can get those things done.”
But Trump’s second-week struggles, including a brazen and potentially unconstitutional attempt to freeze all federal spending and the possibility that two of his Cabinet nominees may not be confirmed, prove Trump’s “golden age” is not a sure bet.
“I think one of the things that we are remembering this week is that no politician, no administration, is unconstrained by politics,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told HuffPost. “Everybody is subject to the laws of politics and the law of gravity.”
Federal Funding Fracas
On Monday evening, the Office of Management and Budget issued a stunning memo ordering federal agencies to pause all financial assistance grants. The order threatened to disrupt a broad swath of federal safety net policies and represented an affront to the constitutional separation of powers, since it’s supposed to be Congress that controls spending, not the White House.
Organizations that receive federal grants, such as charities like Meals on Wheels, said they were concerned they’d be unable to provide services. A spokeswoman for Meals on Wheels America told HuffPost the order “would presumably halt service to millions of vulnerable seniors who have no other means of purchasing or preparing meals.”
The White House initially insisted the order had been misconstrued and that it wouldn’t affect any program that helps Americans in their homes. Two days later, after a court injunction and reports of Medicaid systems outages, Trump officials did an about-face and rescinded the order. Yet they continued to insist the intent of the memo remained in force, prompting a federal judge to threaten to slap a second injunction on the order just to make sure it was dead.
Different White House factions appeared eager to blame one another in the press, a dynamic common in Trump’s chaotic first term. It was such a mess that even some congressional Republicans seemed relieved to move on.
“I think that maybe some of his advisers should have really parsed through that,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told HuffPost. “They’re moving quickly, so when they realized it was going to cause problems, I think it was a good idea to just say, Let’s pull it back and get it right.”
“I guess the best way to put it is: Advise and consent still kind of works once in a while,” added Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), referring to pushback from Congress to Trump’s funding freeze.
Project 2025 Is Here
The first two weeks proved Trump is rapidly working toward dismantling and reshaping the government as laid out in Project 2025, the unpopular conservative policy blueprint that Trump distanced himself from during the 2024 campaign. In line with its recommendations, top federal officials are being purged and millions of federal employees are being pressured to quit, including with promises of vague “buyouts.”
Trump fired 18 inspectors general whose job is rooting out government corruption, axed appointees at two key labor boards, oustedsenior officials at the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury and took a wrecking ball to U.S. foreign aid programs, including the United States Agency for International Development.
The stunning government-wide effort to push out career civil servants appeared to be at least partly driven by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who chairs the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory panel tasked with identifying sources of government waste. Musk’s fingerprints were all over an email government employees received offering an eight-month severance package to leave their jobs.
“It looked like it was the brainchild of Elon Musk,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told reporters this week. “I think it’s really important that federal employees recognize this administration is launching an all-out assault on the merit-based system. That’s what their Schedule F proposal is all about, to replace merit-based federal employees with political cronies.”
“I don’t know if it’s legal, but I would advise them to make sure if they are thinking about it, we know that Donald Trump has a history of not following through.”
A Tragedy On The Potomac
Trump’s first days back in office have also tested his response to major disasters. Last Friday, the president visited North Carolina and California — one state still recovering from devastating flooding and another battling historically destructive wildfires.
But the first disaster to occur solely on Trump’s watch was Wednesday night. An American Airlines commercial jet and Army helicopter collided in midair over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 70 people.
Trump wasted no time politicizing the event, blaming diversity hiring practices for what he falsely characterized as a lowering of standards for air traffic controllers (the results of a preliminary investigation are pending). In reality, Federal Aviation Administration controllers undergo rigorous training and assessment; the biggest obstacle the agency faces is a critical shortage of personnel.
The president, from the White House press briefing room Thursday, read off a list of hiring criteria for diverse candidates from the FAA’s website that were seemingly in place throughout Trump’s first term — meant to imply that a focus on diversity hiring has correlated with worse outcomes for the agency. “We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level,” Trump said.
The briefing was an opportunity for Trump to advance his anti-DEI agenda, blaming the agency’s hiring practices — which are the subject of a long-simmering class-action lawsuit — for what Trump characterized as an avoidable tragedy.
Yet some of Trump’s Senate allies were hesitant to jump to the same conclusion without a thorough investigation.
“Obviously one or more people made a devastating and catastrophic mistake, but we should wait to examine the evidence and understand exactly what went on,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told HuffPost this week.
‘We Still Do Not Have A Plan’
And for all the vigor Trump aims to project directly from the White House, the GOP’s margins in Congress remain narrow enough to severely constrain his expansive legislative ambitions. Republicans are divided over whether to pass Trump’s ambitious domestic policy agenda — including tax cuts, spending cuts, border security and deregulation — in one giant package or a series of smaller bills.
The lack of progress on this front elicited frustration from a key House Republican, who huddled this week with Trump and her colleagues at the president’s hotel in Miami.
“After two days at our House Republican winter retreat, we still do not have a plan on budget reconciliation and our Speaker and his team have not offered one,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) complained online Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are pressing forward with their own plan, regardless of whether their House counterparts get it together. They hope to pass a package that includes funding for border enforcement and energy production while tacking an extension of Trump’s tax cuts later on.
Nominees ‘In Jeopardy’
Three of Trump’s Cabinet nominees faced tough questions during their confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill this week, and two of them — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard — appear in real danger of being blocked by the Senate.
Kennedy, Trump’s health secretary nominee, sought to assure senators he does not oppose vaccines despite his long record of spreading misinformation about them. But one Republican, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, appeared skeptical on Thursday.
After Kennedy refused to give a straight answer on whether vaccines cause autism, Cassidy said, “That’s kind of a yes-or-no question. The data is there.”
Cassidy is a physician and chairman of the Senate’s health committee, and his opinion on the nomination could have extra sway over his fellow Republicans. He’s also crossed Trump before, voting to convict him in a Senate impeachment trial over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
But the Louisiana Republican is facing pressure at home: he’s up for reelection in 2026 and Trump allies have already threatened to support his primary challenger if he does not vote to confirm the president’s nominees.
Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, also faced tough questions from Republicans in her hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The former Democratic congresswoman-turned-Republican firebrand failed to satisfy several GOP senators by refusing to call National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden a “traitor.”
It would likely take four Republican ‘no’ votes on the floor to stop any Trump nomination. Last week, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, barely squeaked by after three GOP senators voted against him: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
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“I have to tell you, I’m worried by what I hear from some of my Republican colleagues. I’m worried that her nomination may be in jeopardy,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) toldFox News after the hearing.