MIAMI — About 36 hours after anyone learned that Donald Trump’s budget office was ordering federal agencies to pause all assistance programs, Republicans in Congress had settled on a message about the controversy: This is all the media’s fault.
“I want to address that ridiculous first media hoax of 2025,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said during a House Republican retreat here. “The Office of Management and Budget’s review of certain spending priorities should be seen for what it is: good governance.”
Emmer continued that there had been “a lot of outright lies from members of the media,” and even though the Trump administration, hours later, would rescind the OMB directive — suggesting that the controversy over the memo was not just some media creation — Emmer was certain the debate over the federal aid freeze was manufactured.
Emmer’s remarks represented a consistent party line, not just from House Republican leadership, but from Republicans in the Senate, in states and in the White House. The idea is that the media invented claims that federal aid programs like Medicaid and disaster relief might be paused during the sudden federal aid freeze, which only explicitly exempted Medicare, Social Security and, vaguely, any assistance “provided directly to individuals.”
“Welcome to the first dumb media hoax of 2025,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted on X.
“That was a false attack,” Sen. Mike Crapo said of the potential that Medicaid would be affected by the freeze.
“The partisan stunt to disseminate knowingly misleading information is dangerous fearmongering and completely wrong,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote on social media.
The rollout — and subsequent rollback — of Monday evening’s surprise OMB memo announcing the temporary federal aid freeze stoked a chaotic couple of days for the GOP. Launching into what they saw as the official manifestation of Project 2025, Democrats — and a few moderate Republicans — blasted Trump for overriding congressionally approved programs and potentially driving up costs by pausing federal subsidies for programs like rental assistance and nutritional aid.
Amid what some GOP lawmakers who read the memo described as “confusion,” the OMB issued a clarification, specifying that “programs, projects, and activities implicated by the President’s Executive Orders” would be subject to the OMB memo. By Tuesday evening, a federal judge halted the freeze minutes before it was scheduled to take effect at 5 p.m.
The fact that the White House rescinded the memo on Wednesday added to the confusion — just as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt added even more confusion when she said on X, “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.”
A White House official also told NOTUS this “does not halt the intended freezing of monies at odds with the president’s” executive orders.
As the contours of the 48-hour ordeal unspooled, plenty of Republican lawmakers — like Emmer — welcomed the sweeping, disruptive move by the Trump administration. If there was criticism to be had, it was, apparently, the media’s fault.
In a statement explaining why the OMB rescinded the memo, Leavitt said it was intended to “end any confusion on federal policy created by the court ruling and the dishonest media coverage.”
There might be a good explanation for the consistent GOP rhetoric around the OMB freeze. On Tuesday morning, staffers at the House Republican conference stopped members before they encountered reporters to review talking points.
“You’re going to be asked about this, here are some talking points,” NOTUS overheard one staffer tell a Republican lawmaker as they shoved a phone in front of them.
One Republican member at the retreat, Rep. Byron Donalds, told NOTUS he agreed that the impact of the freeze on certain programs was “blown out of proportion.”
The crux of the GOP frustration with the media appears to be that many outlets reported that the administration would freeze all federal aid that had been appropriated by Congress — which is what the original memo said.
Rep. Joe Wilson — who had just regaled reporters with a story about his days at South Carolina’s Post and Courier newspaper — stopped short of blaming the media, but he did throw some shade at Democrats like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy for spreading misinformation.
“The error was by the people who were criticizing saying that food stamps and Medicaid had been cut off,” he said.
Of course, there’s a certain irony in Republicans blasting the media for writing about the White House’s directive. Hours before the OMB issued a clarification about what programs would be impacted, top Republicans, like Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, told reporters they saw no problem with the memo.
“I’m not interested in criticizing the media over this,” Cole told NOTUS on Wednesday.
Moderate GOP lawmakers critical of the OMB memo also weren’t keen on dinging the media. And they celebrated that the freeze appeared to be on ice.
Sen. Susan Collins said she was “pleased that OMB is rescinding the memo imposing sweeping pauses in federal programs,” adding that the memo — not the media — “created unnecessary confusion and consternation.”
Rep. Don Bacon, one of the first Republicans to raise alarm bells about the memo on Tuesday, said he “loves” Emmer, but he wasn’t so sure that concern about its effects on aid programs was a figment of the media’s imagination.
“There was a lot of confusion,” Bacon told NOTUS. “And I heard from a lot of constituents.”
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Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.