Democrats’ response this week to President Donald Trump’s attempt to freeze all federal grants and loans already approved by Congress was a rare moment of swift, unified and urgent condemnation.
It was exactly the type of fight many liberal activists in Maine and across the U.S. have been calling for since Trump left Democrats crestfallen, unsure and scattered after his victory in November.
And it was exactly the type of fight Charlie Dingman envisions for the Maine Democratic Party.
“Fundamentally, I think we need to counter the absolutely astonishingly, terrifyingly negative program that our new federal government is offering, or imposing on us,” Dingman said.
Opposing the new “regime,” as Dingman describes it, is precisely what prompted the Leeds attorney to run for chairman of the Maine Democratic Party. He was elected this week by the Democratic state committee, despite not receiving the endorsement of Gov. Janet Mills.
Dingman says the Trump Administration’s plan to consolidate power in the presidency and remake the federal bureaucracy into an administrative state loyal to him — touchstones of the Project 2025 plan drafted by conservative activists — are existential threats to all working people.
And those are exactly the voters that Democrats need, he says.
“It is impossible, I think, to chart a course for the Maine Democratic Party that doesn't first and foremost, respond to the outrageous behavior of our federal government,” he said.
He added, “(It’s) abandoning programs, ideas and fundamental principles that we have come to rely on that aren't enough and that we need more of in order to support working people more effectively. And instead the federal government is rolling them back.”
Democrats attempted to campaign on the dangers of Project 2025, but messaging a governing treatise to large swaths of an electorate captured by social media influencers proved ineffectual. Trump’s attempted funding freeze this week — a plan foreshadowed by Project 2025 — and the ensuing chaos provided Democrats a clear, tangible example of the changes that are coming.
“We have a national government that has just taken power that serves only the interests of the very wealthy,” Dingman said. “(It) has demonstrated in the past week of chaos that they don't care at all about what happens to ordinary people.”
While the funding freeze was a national story the chaos was quickly felt at the local level until the Trump administration walked back the directive. (For now, at least.) Local heating assistance for low-income people appeared to be in danger.
Dan Brennan, director of MaineHousing, the independent state agency that helps administer federal housing and energy assistance programs, told Maine Publice that his office was unable to access any of the federal funds used to pay for those programs.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
Meals on Wheels programs were affected, too. So were grants received by Easterseals, an organization providing services to children and adults with disabilities, older adults and veterans. Payments for Medicaid, the low-income health insurance program for nearly 20 percent of Mainers, were exempted from the infamous funding freeze memo, but state officials were unable to access web portals to process payments and reimbursements.
“This is an unprecedented and unlawful assault on Congress’s constitutional power of the purse, and a dangerous overreach that puts vital federal programs in limbo,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree said in a statement, adding, “These aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet — they represent essential services that millions of Americans rely on.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., had a more succinct critique.
“Egg prices are way up. Medicaid and cancer research are shut down,” he said. “Just what people voted for.”
Pingree and Murphy represent an approach to Trump 2.0 that’s distinct from other Democratic politicians, some of whom have floated the idea that Democrats should not redeploy the “resistance” machine that churned throughout Trump’s first term. Even Pingree, one of Trump’s more vocal critics, told Maine Public recently that Democrats will need to be judicious when sounding the alarm over his policies.
Murphy, in a recent interview with The New Republic, agreed to some extent, but also argued that Democrats need to grapple with the “red-alert” moment that’s been going on for weeks.
“For my colleagues that didn’t want to cry wolf, the wolf is literally chomping at our leg right now,” he said.
Murphy has made the case that Democrats also need to pierce Trump’s “fake populism” by highlighting his allegiance with billionaires, one of whom, Elon Musk, spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars getting him elected. Musk, whose companies have received billions of dollars worth of federal government contracts and subsidies, reportedly will have an office at the White House complex where he’ll oversee a controversial effort to cut government spending.
Dingman, the new chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, mirrored that line of criticism while describing the Trump administration’s actions so far.
“All that really matters for that administration is supporting the desire of the wealthiest people in the world to have even more for themselves and to distract the rest of us by persuading us that we are different from each other and should be fighting with each other,” he said.
But Dingman says it’s going to take more than messaging for Democrats to defeat Trumpism and grow the party. While Maine Democrats managed to defend their two congressional seats and maintain majorities in the Legislature, he says it needs to make a more compelling case through policy that the party is a champion for all working people.
“Maine Democrats have done that in recent years, but there is more to do,” he said. “We need to continue down that path of reaching working people and finding out exactly what we need to do to help them have real opportunity in their lives. And that has a lot to do with not allowing the very wealthy at the national level to take things away. That's the wrong direction.”
The next political buzzword: impoundments
The aforementioned attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in grants was potentially the opening salvo in a larger, more consequential fight over who controls federal spending: the White House or Congress?
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, could figure prominently in that debate.
Earlier this year, Collins ascended to one of the most powerful posts in Congress by becoming chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee — one of the two congressional committees that have control over federal money and how it’s spent.
President Trump and his new team in the White House don’t like that arrangement. And the short-lived funding freeze appears to be part of the administration’s longer-term goal of swinging the balance of power over finances back toward the president.
Current law actually obligates the president, in most circumstances, to spend the money as directed by Congress.
In 1974, Congress reined in the president’s ability to cancel or delay spending — known in Washington-speak as “impoundments” — after President Richard Nixon withheld more than $10 billion that had been appropriated by Congress. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that law the following year, reaffirming congressional control over spending.
But Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, made clear last week that the administration plans to test or challenge the law.
“The president ran on the notion that the Impoundment Control Act (of 1974) is unconstitutional,” Vought said during his Senate confirmation hearing. “I agree with that.”
The Trump administration issued a memo temporarily freezing many federal grants this week, sparking nationwide confusion, pushback and eventually a partial walk-back from the White House. The memo came out and was rescinded before Vought's confirmation by the Senate. Collins criticized the funding freeze, calling it “far too sweeping” and an overreach that “created unnecessary confusion and consternation.”
The new chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee has also signaled her opposition to allowing presidents to unilaterally impound money approved by Congress, telling CNN in December that it “violates the separation of powers.”
“I feel strongly that the Impoundment Act of 1974 is good law, and I don’t want to see it weakened,” she also told Punchbowl News, a DC-centered news site, in December.
Stumping for yellow flag
During her two terms, Gov. Janet Mills has occasionally weighed in on ballot questions that will appear before voters and typically right before the election.
But this week, during a televised, hour-long address about the state’s finances, Mills made it clear that she will oppose a prospective red flag referendum that’s designed to take guns from dangerous people. The proposal hasn’t yet qualified for the ballot, but the governor said it would “undermine” a law that she crafted six years ago with a prominent gun rights group, the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.
“This law is not a burden,” she said while defending the so-called yellow flag law. “These are folks who are in crisis and who, thanks to the mental health assessment, are also now being connected — perhaps for the first time — to Maine’s mental health system.”
The governor was attempting to address a key criticism of Maine’s yellow flag law, a novel version of an extreme risk protection order that no other state has emulated. Unlike other ERPO laws, Maine’s requires cops to initiate the confiscation process, first by taking the person into protective custody, then holding them while a mental health assessment is performed. None of the 21 other states with red flag laws have those steps and gun control advocates argue the law’s mechanics are too burdensome, unfairly stigmatize someone with mental illness and narrow the chances to stop gun violence.
Those critiques were thrust to the forefront after the Lewiston mass shooting in 2023, but Mills successfully beat them back last year in the Democratic-controlled Legislature and she’s continued to defend the law. It’s not yet clear whether Mills will actually campaign against the red flag referendum should it qualify for the November ballot. But her decision to restate her defense of the yellow flag law during her budget address raises the possibility that she will.
Looking ahead…
Here are a few things that we’ll be watching over the coming week or two:
Confirmation votes in DC: Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King participated in committee confirmation hearings this week on two of Trump’s more controversial Cabinet nominees: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. The Senate could vote on those and other nominees (including Vought, mentioned above) in the coming weeks. The relatively narrow GOP majority means Collins will be in the spotlight.
Budgeting in Augusta: Now that Gov. Janet Mills has delivered her “State of the Budget” address, state lawmakers will begin holding public hearings next week on the governor’s $11.6 billion proposed spending plan. The public hearing schedule is available here.
Maine's Political Pulse was written this week by State House bureau chief Steve Mistler and State House correspondent Kevin Miller, and produced by news editor Andrew Catalina. Read past editions or listen to the Political Pulse podcast at mainepublic.org/pulse.
