U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Town of Vermont) points to a wall where he has posted printouts listing the budget line items of all the programs reportedly frozen this week after a memo was issued by the Trump administration. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
This week’s drama over a federal funding freeze is the precursor to a battle in April over federal tax cuts that Democrats are bracing for, according to U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan.
The Wisconsin Democrat met with reporters Thursday, with most of the session focusing on the move by President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this week to suspend the disbursement of federal grant and loan funds.
Even with a federal court order that’s supposed to be blocking the suspension, Pocan said his office and those of his congressional colleagues are hearing from constituents who have been locked out of funding or are worried about its impact on them.
“We’re getting these calls right now — lots and lots of calls,” Pocan said, including from nonprofits that worry they might have to shut down and from funding recipients who have been shut out from online portals through which they’re supposed to receive payments.
“Even though we’re told it’s not happening, it is happening, and they can’t get the funds that they’re [expecting],” Pocan said.
Pocan, whose district includes Wisconsin’s capital, prepped for the media session by filling a conference room wall in his Madison office with printouts of budget line items affected by the Trump administration’s suspension. He said he got the list of items from a New York Times report.
“When he said he was going to freeze funding to 2,600 different federal lines, that’s what’s [on] the wall right there,” Pocan said.
“We’re getting calls from university researchers” worried about National Institutes of Health grants being frozen, he said. “And if you disrupt research in the middle of it, you’ve lost all the money that you put into some of that research.”
His office has heard from a wide range of other federal funds recipients.
“We’re getting K-12 schools who are still going to lose money for their lunch programs, worried about what they’re going to do — and this is for kids who often this is the only meal that they’re getting during the day,” Pocan said.
Also on the list, he said, are funds that include rural broadband projects, disaster aid, the Small Business Administration and a USDA dairy innovation project — one that Pocan said had bipartisan support from two Wisconsin lawmakers, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden.
How the suspension unfolded echoed what Trump said this past summer, “when he talked in the debate about having a concept of a plan of health care,” Pocan said. “I think pretty much that’s how he operates — he doesn’t have plans, but he has concepts of plans, which often don’t execute.”
At the same time, though, he said the details reflected Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document that circulated last year as a blueprint for a second Trump term, even though Trump disavowed it during the campaign.
“If you have any question of what they might do, I would look at Project 2025,” Pocan said. “It’s very clear that that is the guiding document for much of what they’re doing.”
Beyond the current turmoil, however, Pocan, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said the episode foreshadows what Democratic congressional leaders expect will be a major budget bill in April. They foresee legislation that will extend and magnify the tax cuts that Trump and Congress enacted in 2017, during the president’s first term, and the broad swath of programs caught up in the suspension would be the price, he said.
“This is setting up the cuts for getting funding to give a tax break to those who can afford to go to Mar-A-Lago and the billionaires that were attending the inaugural and all the tech folks,” Pocan said.
“Part of it is just this awful idea that you’re going to cut things that help real people to the degree that you need to” to pay for extending the 2017 tax cuts, he added, pegging the estimate at $4 trillion.
“It would take that, plus they’re talking about lowering the corporate tax rate and a whole lot of other things,” Pocan said. “But everything that’s here is affecting people in the district and across the country for the most part.”
He predicted that the impact wouldn’t be limited to people who don’t support the president. “I guarantee there’s a lot of people who are Trump voters who are going to be very negatively impacted by the cuts that he wants to do in order to give Elon Musk a tax break,” he said.
Congressional Democrats are mapping a three-part response — “litigation, communication — talking about what’s here — and the appropriations process,” Pocan said. “We will probably be doing a lot to highlight this.”
He expects that to be a “the determinative vote for Congress coming up in the Trump administration,” Pocan said. “Because if you vote for a reconciliation bill, it has a giant tax break, and you’re taking that money from lower income folks and people of average income in the district by cutting programs like this.”
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