The recent federal funding freeze spurred immediate finger-pointing inside the Trump administration, with anonymous sources telling major news outlets that attorney Mark Paoletta was responsible for drafting the infamous memo that briefly paused trillions in federal funds. Paoletta, newly returned as the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) general counsel, is connected to a wide range of powerful figures on the right, including multiple conservative Supreme Court justices, the organizers of Project 2025, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Multiple anonymous sources said Paoletta’s job was at risk, “though no final decision has been made,” ABC News reported on Friday.

With the OMB memo, the Trump administration threw a wild punch it claimed was aimed at the “green new deal” and other abstract concepts — but landed as a very real blow to American doctors, teachers, and a dizzying array of public services and programs whose federal funding access was abruptly thrown into question.

The OMB memo was rapidly rescinded — but not before it unleashed chaos, upending the work of thousands of government agencies that issue grants and loans to organizations providing services across the world. From Medicaid reimbursements to early childhood program payments, some of the most significant and immediate disruptions hit at the very agencies the White House later claimed it had specifically intended to leave unaffected. The memo sparked multiple legal challenges and court orders blocking OMB’s freeze from taking effect, at least for now.

Paoletta did not respond to a request for comment from DeSmog.

The blame placed on Paoletta is a sign that infighting is already emerging within the Trump administration, just two weeks after the new president assumed office.

Stephen Miller and other senior Trump officials never reviewed the OMB memo before it went out, anonymous sources also told the major media organizations that reported on Paoletta’s involvement.

Tensions inside the Trump administration may be heightened by internal contradictions between its stated priorities on energy and power struggles between Musk’s DOGE project, which aims to impose widespread austerity measures (amid massive fossil fuel subsidies), and supporters of Project 2025, which seeks, for example, to shift federal energy spending towards “increasing energy security and supply through fossil fuels.”

The government’s fossil fuel subsidies pose a thorny problem for the Trump administration’s efforts to slash spending. “These handouts to the oil and gas industry, which allows these multinational corporations to earn billions of dollars a year, fly in the face of everything else they talk about,” Matthew Tejada, a senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist in early January.

Paoletta has worked with both DOGE and Project 2025’s backers.

“Mark will work closely with our DOGE team to cut the size of our bloated Government bureaucracy, and root out wasteful and anti-American spending,” President Donald Trump said in December as he announced Paoletta’s return to the OMB. 

“I am thrilled to be rejoining my friend @russvought at OMB where we will once again be the tip of the spear to implement President Trump’s agenda, including working w/ @DOGE to cut wasteful government spending!,” Paoletta posted on X that day, drawing a “Congratulations” reply from Musk.

Until recently, Paoletta was also listed as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a far-right think tank led by Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s key architects and Trump’s nominee to lead the OMB. The Center for Renewing America, DeSmog previously reported, counts oil billionaire Tim Dunn among its funders.

Though the Trump administration has sought to publicly distance itself from Project 2025, the organization’s Mandate for Leadership, marketed as a roadmap for Trump on his return to the presidency, foreshadowed this week’s funding freeze. “The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government,” Vought wrote in a chapter devoted to the OMB. “Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”

Many of the organizations that contributed to Project 2025 have extensive histories of climate denial, DeSmog reported shortly after the election in November.

High Court Connections 

Paoletta brings close connections with Supreme Court justices to Trump’s OMB. Especially notable: Paoletta is a “long-time friend” to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to Politico. Paoletta not only helped to usher Thomas through his fraught confirmation process in 1991, he also defended Ginni Thomas, Justice Thomas’ wife, before the January 6 select committee. 

He’s cozy enough with both Justice Thomas and billionaire and conservative activist Harlan Crow to be depicted in a portrait hanging in Crow’s Adirondack’s lodge, a 2023 investigation by ProPublica found. The painting shows Paoletta seated next to Thomas, accompanied by Crow, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, and attorney Peter Rutledge. 

Justice Thomas was dubbed “fossil fuels’ best friend on the Supreme Court” by Law Students for Climate Accountability, which called for his resignation citing his ties to Crow, the Koch network, and other “oil tycoons.”

Paoletta also worked to confirm two other current Supreme Court justices — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Expansive Sweep of Presidential Power

The two-page memo Paoletta allegedly drafted for the OMB sought to exert presidential control over trillions of dollars in Congressionally approved spending, requiring agencies to review “all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities” for their consistency with the President’s priorities. Federal agencies were told to identify activities “implicated” by Trump’s flurry of executive orders “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Instructions circulated with the memo list 2,600 federal programs required to undertake a review — including over 500 that didn’t report actually spending a dime in 2024, according to The New York Times.

Federal employees involved in everything from regulating consumer product safety standards for pools and spas to Pentagon research into detecting chemical, biological, and radiological weapons were asked to scrutinize their work for “gender ideology” or “an undue burden on… domestic energy resources” — with no hints as to what either term might mean.

Environmental regulators were among those impacted. “At [the Environmental Protection Agency] EPA, this means that funds for safe drinking water projects, Superfund cleanup, and sewage construction will halt, costing jobs and harming public health,” Environmental Protection Network Executive Director Michelle Roos said in a statement on the funding freeze. “These measures are illegal and come on the heels of President Trump firing the Inspectors General at 17 government agencies, including EPA.”

“These unparalleled actions are being advertised as temporary, but that doesn’t mean that things will get better,” Roos said. “These will likely be the foundation of even more extreme actions to follow.”