Funding Freeze Chaos Dominates First White House Briefing

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : Leavitt told reporters that the pause in federal funding was designed to give Trump appointees time to review all federal funding going out the door to be sure it is "in line with the President's agenda."
44% : White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, "this is not a blanket pause on federal assistance in grant programs from the Trump administration."
43% : Leavitt refused to clearly state whether Medicaid, the health insurance safety net, would be impacted by the freeze, but the White House eventually clarified it wasn't intended to be.
41% : The funding freeze was the latest sign that Trump intends to test how far he can push the limits of presidential power.
39% : The Constitution gives Congress the authority to decide how much funding should be spent on federal programs, but Trump showed this week that he intends to ignore Congressional directives and block money for programs he doesn't like.
37% : States had trouble accessing funds for Medicaid.
22% : The top Democrat in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, said the order was an example of "more lawlessness and chaos in America" from Trump.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.