Donald Trump s administration is lying to you : Illinois Governor JB Pritzker slams Trump and his team as either liars or critically incompetent

Get the Full StoryDonald Trump s administration is moving fast. In just a few short days, he s passed hundreds of executive orders ranging from free speech to over reaching ICE raids, making it hard for anyone to keep an eye on all the balls in the air. His rapid-fire orders are coming so quickly that when an order came down to freeze federal grants and loans by 8 pm Tuesday, January 28, many officials were just as confused as their constituents. Uncertainty over where their next meals or paychecks would come from shook average Americans whose lives depend on government benefits for hours before a federal judge stepped in and froze the order. Public outcry has pushed the Trump administration to roll back the order for the time being, but it s set off warning bells across the country, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker isn t letting the administration sweep the fear-inducing order under the rug. Let me say this in no uncertain terms: the President s actions today are illegal. Cutting off people from healthcare, childcare, and other services is cruel.The State of Illinois will fight this unlawful order with everything we have. Governor JB Pritzker govpritzker.illinois.gov 2025-01-29T00:42:46.728Z Pritzker has been fighting with Republicans for years. He s been in a bitter back and forth with Governor Greg Abbott ever since the Texan shipped hundreds of immigrants to Chicago unannounced and was named as a potential running mate for Kamala Harris. His call to arms came after the Illinois Department of Health and Human Services found that it was unable to access payment sites and portals for Medicaid and the ACA, Meals on Wheels, Head Start programs, and Temporary Aide to Needy Families TANF , among others, throughout the day. Illinois was just one of 50 states to fall into disorder, and Pritzker says that when they reached out to federal agencies for guidance, they responded that they had been directed not to discuss any guidance with states. Pritzker says that the immediate stop came with zero warning from Trump and indicated that states were working off of a memo from Trump s budget office. The memo claims that in order to ensure that funds weren t misappropriated, all federal agencies must temporarily pause disbursements so they could uncover whether or not funds were used for things including DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal. The pause would allow the administration to determine what to spend on programs it found consistent with the law and the President s priorities. The Office of Management and Budget claims that the freeze could have lasted less than a day if it determined that the programs were in compliance and that the impacts have been misunderstood. But it s impossible not to see how sweeping and vague the wording is, or to ignore the distress millions of Americans felt. After the freeze, the administration walked back the memo and issued a clarification fact sheet. According to NPR, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said rescinding the memo would end the court case against it, but that the executive orders remain in full force and effect. The intent here is to disrupt, Pritzker said Tuesday. In sic all 50 states across the country, we discovered that our ability to access critical federal funding had been cut off. And now the administration would like us to believe these were just coincidental website outages. They are either lying to us or they are critically incompetent.

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