Why does the government fund things, and what happens when it stops?

Civics 101

NHPR

Society & Culture, Government, History

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Congress appropriates funds, the executive branch ensures those funds are spent and spent wisely. That is how it works. It is not, however, how it is working right now. The Trump Administration has, in recent months, repeatedly and often successfully frozen the funds that Congress assigned to certain departments and agencies. Jobs have been lost, research shelved, life-saving care ended, budgets and plans thrown into disarray. So why and how has this happened? Why were we funding education, science, medicine and foreign aid in the first place? Our guide to this tumult is Samuel Bagenstos, professor of law at the University of Michigan and former Chief Counsel at both the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Health and Human Services. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Nick?
0:01.2	Yes, Hannah.
0:02.3	Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone?
0:08.1	Are we doing an episode about paving the rose garden?
0:11.0	We are not.
0:12.0	I'm just checking.
0:13.3	You think Joni Mitchell would let us play Big Yellow Taxi on the show?
0:17.2	Tell you what.
0:18.2	I'll have my people get in touch with her people.
0:20.6	Who are your people?
0:22.2	Me. I'm my people.
0:24.2	Yeah.
0:26.8	But the reason I quote Miss Mitchell here is because her words are a truism that has applied a whole lot lately.
0:34.4	Things have gone away. Things that make a lot of people realize just what we had.
0:40.0	Things that made me ask, wait a minute, why did we have that? Why do we have what exactly?
0:47.5	Thousands of staff and contractors were fired while humanitarian aid to some of the world's
0:52.4	most vulnerable populations was stopped.
0:55.0	At the end of the day, what really impacts are the kids and the families.
0:58.0	They're the ones that are depending on childcare.
1:00.0	Not just in Gaza, but around the world, a series of decisions that could have profound consequences
1:04.0	on the well-being of so many people.
1:06.0	UCLA is losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding.
	...

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