The Office of Management and Budget had, of course, by then entered the picture, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, but we suspected more likely because Trump used Mulvaney to put a stop to any efforts by the State or Defense Departments to move funds they respectively supervised. The budget office was also trying to rescind more than $4 billion of foreign economic assistance (which affected only the State Department, not the Pentagon), an annual exercise. As in 2018, the budgeteers ultimately backed down, mostly because there would have been open warfare with Congress had Trump decided to
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