Andy Kroll

And it sits at this critical juncture in the American government.

Congress, as we talked about, passes the laws.

appropriates the funds, sets the policy agenda.

And I think a lot of Americans figure that, okay, Congress does that, the money goes to these agencies, the plans, the laws go to the agencies, and that's how our government works.

But there is this office, OMB, that sits in between Congress and the agencies that in the hands of Russ Fote has become this choke point.

to cut off funding, to cut off the functioning of programs, and to exert the president's will in a way that we honestly haven't seen since the Nixon administration.

Not in a permanent official kind of way.

The director of the Office of Management and Budget can't put a veto on, say, a multibillion-dollar program to support clean energy or to build the Second Avenue subway in New York City.

That is the role of Congress.

Again, writes the laws, appropriates the money.

What OMB does in normal times...

is what I've kind of likened to a loving but cautious parent who gives out an allowance to their kids at sort of regular intervals to try to make sure that those kids don't spend the money that's going to them in one fell swoop.

So OMB apportions money, to use the wonky term, to federal agencies at a kind of

regular cadence to basically make sure that, say, the EPA doesn't run out of money two months before the fiscal year's over.

Agencies have some problems with controlling the spending if they don't have that sort of regulator in place, that cadence coming from OMB.

So that's what OMB normally does.

What it has done in a massive way, in an unprecedented way, with Russ Votencharge, is actually say, we're just not going to apportion that money, period.

We've frozen money that is supposed to go from Congress to, say, the National Institutes of Health or the Environmental Protection Agency or the IRS.

We're freezing it.

And they give various reasons.