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From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

President Trump puts a quick pause on federal grants and loans to have his administration review their terms,

sparking claims of executive overreach and a stay by a federal judge before the White House reverses course and removes the pause two days later. Welcome, I'm

Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, columnists Alicia

Finley, and Bill McGern. The Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, might be the most important

agency that is the least well known among the general public.

But OMB is expected to be at the center of the action during the second Trump administration.

And so it is this week.

On Monday, the acting head of OMB issued a two-page memo with an order to federal agencies

to pause grant and loan programs. It says career and political

appointees in the executive branch had a duty to align federal spending and action with the will

of the American people as expressed through presidential priorities. It directed that this temporary

pause was to take effect at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, so not a whole

lot of notice there. Now, here we sit here on Wednesday, and the White House has removed that

pause. We'll get into that a bit later. But let's start with a few clips of the response.

This is Chuck Schumer today. His take on

this budget freeze. In one instant, in the blink of an eye, in the dark of night, Donald Trump

committed one of the cruelest actions that I have seen the federal government do in a very long

time.

Cutting off, shutting off, billions, maybe trillions of dollars of things that average American families need.

...