Subject: Re: Medicaid
Where's it say, "Medicaid"?

Right here:

"Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance"

Medicaid is a Federal financial assistance program. All federal financial assistance programs are required to be paused. Hence, Medicaid must be paused.

Unless you're arguing that unless the original OMB order has the magic words of a program title then it's exempt from the freeze. That they have to say the name, or federal employees should determine it's not frozen? But that can't be right, because then every program would be exempt from the freeze. It wouldn't apply to anything, because it doesn't name a single program to be frozen individually.

OMB screwed up. Yes, everyone knew that OMB screwed up, and would probably fix the part of the screw-up that made the order apply to Medicaid. But because they did screw up, it meant that the order did apply to Medicaid until they fixed it. Which called everyone's attention to how rushed and sloppy and stupid this approach to a "pause" was, and made it untenable for them to continue.