The White House on Wednesday reversed in part its directive to freeze trillions in federal loans and grants, a day after a federal judge put the sweeping spending edicts on pause.
The Office of Management and Budget rescinded an order that would have frozen loan and grant spending across government, including for programs in Georgia channeled through scores of federal, state and local agencies and nonprofits. The lack of detail in Trump’s order sowed widespread confusion Tuesday.
It’s unclear whether the plan is on hold permanently. A White House spokeswoman said President Donald Trump’s orders targeting federal spending in areas like diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change remain in effect.
More than 2,600 programs across the federal government were included in a spreadsheet as being under review, according to a document obtained by The New York Times. Some listed programs involve direct payments to Americans, which the Trump administration said were not to be frozen. The list showed that the programs under review touched nearly every aspect of civic life, from agriculture and nutritional assistance to highway and transit programs. They included education programs and funding for law enforcement, the arts, health care, small business loans, economic development and energy.
“The significant harms implicit in this overreaching order has led to its rollback,” Lisa Gilbert, copresident of consumer watchdog Public Citizen, said in a statement. “The incompetence and cruelty of this order caused nationwide confusion and anxiety, as across the country regular Americans spoke out about the human impacts — the loss of jobs, essential services, and harms to children among many other vulnerable populations — to name only a few.”
Trump campaigned in part on slashing the federal government. The federal freeze announcement triggered confusion among state and local governments and nonprofits that deliver services with federal funding.
Amid mounting confusion and alarm, the White House budget office issued a directive late Tuesday which said the freeze was designed to bring spending in line with the president’s recent executive orders on curtailing foreign aid and funding for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Trump administration later clarified that programs that provided aid directly to Americans, such as Medicaid and food stamps and payments to farmers, were not affected. But the spreadsheet the Times obtained listed health care, nutrition and agricultural programs as being ones included for review.
A federal judge put a temporary stay on the Trump order just minutes before it was slated to take effect Tuesday.
Georgia receives tens of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans, according to an analysis of federal data by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
‘It’s chaos’
Rheitta Ohene-Amoako, the executive director of the Learning Hive in Lawrenceville, is one of hundreds of child care providers in Georgia who received a scary email from the state on Wednesday.
“I regret to inform you that the Childcare and Parent Services payment will be delayed,” it read. “We currently do not have access to the federal funds needed to make CAPS payments.”
Ohene-Amoako had already done the math: Of the roughly 90 students enrolled in her two programs, about 75% receive subsidies from CAPS, the Georgia program that provides child care scholarships to low-income families. If the freeze went into effect, she would only have enough money to float payroll for her staff of 22 for maybe two weeks.
Families who couldn’t afford child care without the assistance would have to pull their kids from the program, and then they wouldn’t have anyone to watch their kids when they went to work.
“It’s chaos,” she said. “We cannot survive past a month, I can tell you that.”
Even after the White House announced that it would rescind the freeze, a spokesperson for the state Department of Early Childcare and Learning said that the funding from the federal government had not hit the agency’s bank account yet — meaning payments would still be delayed.
“As much as I want to stay out of politics, politics is affecting us all now,” Ohene-Amoako said.
Child care funding is part of more than $250 billion in federal spending under the U.S. Department of Education that was under review, per the original memo. That total included funding for federal work-study, vocational programs, adult education, college readiness programs, literacy programs, school safety and charter and magnet schools. They also include programs that support homeless students, migrant students, students who are learning English, Native American students, low-income students and students with disabilities.
Tens of billions of dollars in federal loans and grants administered by the Small Business Administration were included in the programs the White House listed as under review. The SBA is the federal government’s main entity to support and grow the country’s nearly 35 million small businesses.
In a memo the OMB sent Tuesday to try to clarify its Monday night memo, the office said funds for small businesses would not be paused under the order, though it did not specify what funds exactly were exempt.
For many small businesses, the SBA programs may be the only ones that will give them much needed capital and at lower rates than big banks. In fiscal year 2024, more than 2,200 small businesses in Georgia received loans totaling about $1.6 billion from the SBA, according to the SBA.
Nearly all of the businesses in Georgia — 99.7% — are small businesses, the SBA reports.
Former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., is Trump’s pick to lead the SBA. When asked Wednesday by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., during her confirmation hearing whether the president’s decision to pause funding was lawful, Loeffler danced around the question, saying, “I fully agree with President Trump’s decision to stop wasteful spending.”
‘Trickle down’
The initial Trump order also sparked concern among recipients of other federal grants, including for economic development, homelessness, transportation and the arts.
The federal grant program that’s helping pay for projects like the Stitch and the Flint River Trail was one of the ones under review. Metro Atlanta projects have received nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through the Reconnecting Communities program. Roughly $159 million is for the first phase of The Stitch, which would cap a portion of the Downtown Connector and build a green space on top.
Almost $65 million was awarded for a trail network connecting the Atlanta Beltline with the Flint River. When finished, the trail would run 31 miles from southwest Atlanta to Clayton County. Two other Atlanta projects were awarded grant money just weeks before the now-rescinded order. A total of $2.8 million was awarded to projects at the Centennial Yards redevelopment and in Sweet Auburn to improve bike and pedestrian access.
Local governments also receive millions each year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The largest HUD awards usually come from the Community Development Block Grant, which funds a range of needs in low-income communities including economic development, public facilities, housing rehabilitation and homeowner assistance.
Several CDBG buckets were listed in the spending programs under review.
In the 2024 fiscal year, HUD allocated almost $5.7 million in CDBG funding to Gwinnett County, $4.6 million to DeKalb County, $3.5 million to Cobb County and $1.3 million to Fulton County.
On Monday — the same day the original White House order went out — the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority announced it had awarded millions in loans from the federal Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds, both multibillion dollar Environmental Protection Agency programs that were under review.
In metro Atlanta, the city of Cumming was awarded almost $5.3 million from the federal loan programs, to be repaid at 2.25% interest, for new water and sewer lines to reduce septic tanks and improve water quality. The federal loans pay for water and sewer infrastructure and pollution prevention. They were established by the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act. The 2025 pre-application period through GEFA is still open.
Prior to the Trump administration’s reversal, GEFA said it was evaluating the order.
Waduda Muhammad, the executive director of Georgians for the Arts, a nonprofit arts organization focused on arts advocacy, feared for the impact on the arts. The threat of losing funding from the National Endowment for the Arts could be “catastrophic” for a state that already ranks dead last in state arts funding, she said.
Two buckets of NEA funding were listed in the spreadsheet of programs under review obtained by the Times. In the five years between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, the NEA distributed $39,362,916 in federal funding, either directly or through state and regional partners, in Georgia, according to the NEA.
“It’s a trickle down all the way down to counties and cities and organizations,” Muhammad said.
The arts are a significant part of Georgia’s economy. They account for $29 billion annually in economic impact, or 4.2% of the state’s economy, and support 149,000 total jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
— Staff writers Riley Bunch, Danielle Charbonneau, Matt Reynolds and freelancer Meris Lutz contributed to this report.
