There is no budget "deal" to be made

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The original budget justification for the State Department for FY2025, which ended September 30th last week, stretched to hundreds of pages and totaled nearly $60 billion. Congress itself worked on the budget for months — the related House appropriations bill HR 8771 was introduced by Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart in the 118th Congress in the spring of 2024 and dozens of amendments were considered and voted on. When Congress made its budget deal for that year, the legislative appropriations carried with them the force of law — and previous presidents, like Richard Nixon, have faced possible impeachment when they’ve failed to follow the precise spending requirements laid out by the Senate and the House.

None of that mattered, though, when Elon Musk spent a winter weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” As he wrote on February 3rd, “Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.” It’s not even clear today how much of DOGE’s dismantling of USAID Trump understood or authorized in advantage, but before anyone realized, it was a fait accompli.

Decades of institutional knowledge, delicate international relationships, a proud source of US soft power, and a vital part of humanitarian relief the world over disappeared in just days. US foreign service personnel and thousands of contractors were uprooted, fired, cashiered, and forced to move; US intelligence programs and covert operations were upended. As best as we can tell, stockpiles of food and contraceptives — stockpiles already paid for by the US taxpayer! — were destroyed rather than handed off to groups that could make use of them. Allies and countries that counted on the US for assistance were left to twist in the wind, and adversaries like China were able to rush into the openings left behind.

Elon Musk sentenced millions of people to death and couldn’t even be bothered to get the grammar right on his joke about it.

USAID, whose operations and budgets encompassed thousands of words and dozens of pages of US law, is now gone. The court cases are still playing out, and — not surprisingly — courts are saying it’s illegal for the president to do something like this, but the reality is that the agency has ceased to exist. it will take perhaps a quarter century to rebuild the damage done, if the US ever bothers to try, and USAID, an agency estimated to have saved 90 million lives over the past two decades, will never be what it once was.

Health and aid officials now estimate some 14 million people will die in the months and years ahead because USAID is gone.

No one in power in Congress on the Republican side, which controls both chambers, seemed to care or object in a meaningful way.

The destruction of USAID is a critical lesson and thought experiment in understanding the backdrop of the current federal government shutdown.

Earlier this spring, I wrote about how America was experiencing not a “Constitutional crisis” — which would incorrectly imply there was ongoing tension between the three branches of government or some burning unanswered question about the powers held by those various branches — but a “Constitutional crash.”

A “crash,” I wrote, “not in the plane crash or car crash sense, but in the medical sense—we’re living through the sudden, ER-style flatlining of the healthy biorhythms of our 249-year-old constitutional order. […] The problem is that in effectively a single blink of the historical eye, we’ve seen our entire constitutional system simply … stop. We aren’t just outside the bounds of normal constitutional operations; we’re several standard deviations outside anything America has ever experienced before. We can clearly see what’s happening is wrong—illegal and unconstitutional—and the actors who can do something about that just … aren’t.”

Today, with the federal government shutdown over the failed budget talks, I think we’re experiencing the consequences of that crash.

President Trump in a few short months has so broken the constitutional framework as to make joint normal, responsible government impossible.

Right now, at least publicly, the shutdown largely hinges on a deal to continue health subsidies for some 24 million Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace to buy insurance. But even if Democrats and Republicans come to an agreement on those expiring subsidies, no one has answered the fundamental question: How can Democrats count on those agreed-upon subsidies actually being paid?

These budget negotiations and the shutdown must be seen against the backdrop of the entire year of presidential overreach and constitutional violations. All year, we’ve seen this administration treat appropriations bills less as laws-to-follow and more like Lucy playing football with Charlie Brown. What should make this moment any different?

How can anyone in Congress — Democrats or Republicans — make a budget “deal” with this administration if we now know the President is going to ignore implementing any part of the “deal” he wants?

How can anyone in Congress make a deal if we now know that the President is going to go outside any understandable or defensible international legal or moral framework to murder people on the high seas if he wants to, bypassing Congress’s own role in warmaking and making up his own new category of personal war?

What deal is there to make if, after Congress appropriates funds and authorizes operations, Trump will just appoint leaders like Kari Lake at Voice of America who fires the workforce, shuts-down the programs, and literally sells off the historic office space?

How do you arrive at a compromise budget that reflects the congressional priorities of 535 members of the House and Senate when Trump will just illegally withhold grant monies at places like the National Institutes of Health that he doesn’t want to give out or crush universities and colleges that don’t bend to his will?

Why should Congress bother to pass laws — laws, for instance, that mandate that members of Congress have the right to inspect ICE facilities at any time without warning — if the administration, DHS, and ICE is just going to ignore them?

How do you fund a government if Donald Trump then appoints a Cabinet secretary like Linda McMahon at the Department of Education who effectively shuts down the department and stops giving out billions that states and local schools are counting on?

Why should members of Congress trust the administration with its constitutional duty that “the President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” if, as he did with Tiktok, the president will just write a memo saying that US companies don’t have to obey a law based on his say-so?

What “deal” is there to make while Donald Trump is militarizing our cities, launching Fourth Amendment-violating raids on American citizens, and federalizing National Guard troops to literally invade states run by Democrats?

Very few Democrats seem to understand this new dynamic; Democrats are so used to being the “responsible” party who helps keeps government open and funded that they seem not to be able to reckon with how irrelevant Donald Trump has made Congress or their appropriations bills.

The lawmaker who does mostly clearly get this is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who had a heated exchange with Sen. Katie Britt earlier this summer about just this problem. “She and I write the Department of Homeland Security budget together,” Murphy said later. “She’s the chairman, I’m the top-ranking Democrat. And I was saying to her, how on Earth are we going to write a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security when the president is engaged every single day in illegal activity?”

As Murphy explained: “Why would I trade baseball cards with my friend if he tells me I’m going to break into your house tomorrow night and steal my cards back?”

Murphy was even more blunt with POLITICO this summer: Trump “doesn’t give a fuck what we write” into appropriations bills.

A representative democracy literally cannot function if elected officials fail to listen to the elected representatives.

The story of the rise of Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime is so often the story of Congress failing to do its most basic jobs in terms of legislating and oversight. Year by year, decade by decade, it has ceded power to the executive branch because of its own inability to do hard things, pass legislation on time, or defend its constitutional prerogatives in showdowns with the executive branch. (Much of the story of the economic whiplash of TACO Trump’s haphazard “fire, ready, aim” tariffs is also the story of Congress delegating and surrendering the power to levy tariffs to the president.)

Congress, under both Republicans and Democrats, has been failing for years to do its most basic duty of passing annual budgets and appropriations bill on the normal timeline. Much of government now regularly operates for months under so-called “continuing resolutions,” short-term stop-gap measures that just keep in place the previous year’s budget until a new one can be passed. (And by “for years,” I mean for decades — in the last 47 years, Congress has been forced to pass at least one continuing resolution all but three times.) The problem has been steadily getting worse. Last year, Congress didn’t pass ANY of its main 12 appropriations bills by the deadline of the new fiscal year. “CRs” are a mess for government agencies — they’re backward-looking and, by definition, fail to incorporate new needs, domestic or international changes, or shifting priorities.

But the problem today is something even worse: Between House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate leader John Thune, Congress has shown it is unwilling to force the president to follow the law, to even lean a little bit on Donald Trump and say, “Hey, we passed these budgets through a Republican-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate, we’re counting on this money to be spent this way for our constituents, and you have to follow these laws.”

(Again, one can imagine the outrage from the right if any of these had happened in the reverse — if Biden had withheld monies from Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana or tried to crush the University of South Dakota in Thune’s home state — and it’s worth noting that the GOP’s unwillingness to defend Congress’s “power of the purse” stands as another dangerous sign of how Republicans are clearly not planning on ever losing power at this point.)

At a dinner last night, I said I think we’re underestimating the chance that the federal government shutdown stretches not just to days but to weeks or months. Shutdowns — this is Trump’s fourth, by the way — are enormous hardships on the families of federal workers. Tens of thousands of TSA officers and FAA air traffic controllers are working without paychecks to protect air travel right now, as James Fallows wrote thoughtfully about — and each passing day the effects of the federal shutdown will multiply. Large swaths of the country and daily life will get slower, less safe, and less functional. But regardless of the hardships ahead I don’t see how any Democrat involved in the budget negotiations is able to put faith in a single promise made by this administration, about ACA subsidies or anything else.

This is a Republican problem and the solutions and paths out of it need to emerge from Republican leaders — but unfortunately, as they have time and time again, the Republican members of Congress have chosen to put party fealty above Constitutional duty.

The astounding part about all of this is that Congress is choosing to lose a poker hand where it actually holds all the cards. There is no ambiguity about its power of the purse. As a co-equal branch to the executive, it could — as my friend Ben Wittes jokes — write legislation that says something in effect like, “Nice presidential helicopter you have, but we’ve defunded Marine One and you now have to drive everywhere until you start following the law again.”

The fact that the GOP is unwilling to defend the role of the GOP-controlled Congress is the GOP’s problem to solve.

The Republican Congress and the Trump administration made this bed; they, across all three branches, are fully responsible for the crash of our constitutional system; and until Mike Johnson and John Thune figure out how they’re going to preserve and enforce the literal force of law that their appropriations bills are supposed to have, it’s hard to see why Democrats in either chamber should vote to enable ongoing lawlessness.

GMG

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