Inside 45 hours of chaos: The brief life and quick death of Trump’s federal spending freeze

Washington, DC (CNN) — The Trump administration’s biggest swing at radically reshaping federal spending lasted just under 45 hours.A sweeping freeze on trillions in federal spending for grants and loans, issued Monday night by the White House budget office to federal agencies without fanfare, sparked outrage and confusion – even among fellow Republicans. The impact touched all corners of the country, with state Medicaid funding portals briefly shuttered and programs like Meals on Wheels and Head Start scrambling to figure out if they were about to lose their funding.The White House insisted that the confusion was a media-led creation. But on Wednesday the Office of Management and Budget issued a terse two-sentence memo rescinding the directive it had issued just two days prior, and just over 20 hours after a federal judge ordered a halt to the freeze.The withdrawal of the federal freeze was a stunning about-face for President Donald Trump’s White House, which has so far pushed the envelope to reshape the federal government in Trump’s mold, sowing chaos and confusion that comes with firing career civil servants, pausing foreign aid programs and offering federal workers a buyout.The episode underscored the risks of a White House adopting the tech-inspired...