President Donald Trump intended his flood of executive orders to shock and awe his opponents. But on Monday night, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget instead shocked the Trump White House.
That memo, with its call for a “temporary pause” to all federal-government grants and loans, set off widespread panic and confusion within the federal government and among the millions of individuals and institutions reliant on federal funds.

Put on the spot, a lot of Americans might hesitate over the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. People who aren’t affected by one of these programs, which together enroll about 150 million people in the U.S., don’t generally have a need to be well versed in their intricacies, and the two programs sound quite similar.

Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories as litigants rush to settle their cases. Mark Zuckerberg is the latest.

The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.
It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity.

Updated at 4:54 p.m. ET on January 29, 2025.
The great federal-grant freeze of 2025 is over, but don’t expect it to be gone for good.
The Office of Management and Budget, which issued a memo freezing grants on Monday, has revoked it, The Washington Post first reported. The whole thing went so fast that many people may have never had a chance to sort out what was happening.