The Daily Populous Tuesday April 28th, 2026 night edition
Authored by prospect.org and submitted by harsh2k5

More than three weeks ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) agreed to Democratic terms to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), except for its immigration enforcement agencies. That bill has still not become a law, prolonging the longest shutdown of any government agency in history.

Nobody has even thought about the DHS shutdown for a while, because President Trump signed executive orders to first pay airport security agents on March 27, and then all other agency personnel on April 3, under the guise of emergency action. It should be said plainly: This is illegal, it has always been illegal, and the precedent it sets pushes Congress, the branch of government with the power of the purse, into total irrelevance.

There is no colorable piece of legislation that allows the president to pay DHS workers when Congress hasn’t appropriated money to do so; Trump’s claim that any funds with a “nexus” to those DHS workers is fair game for this funding is just a lie. But there’s been a mass conspiracy of silence around this, because nobody, least of all Congress, wants to tell TSA agents or anyone else that they have to work without pay any longer.

This seizure of power by the executive branch and trampling of the normal appropriations process is evident in yesterday’s resolution of the DHS funding crisis, too. Early Thursday morning, the Senate passed a budget resolution to appropriate money to the two agencies that Democrats have refused to fund without reforms—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The plan, which uses the party-line reconciliation process to avoid a Senate filibuster, will stock ICE and CBP with $70 billion in baseline funding for the next three years.

The Trump administration has routinely taken money expressly authorized for any number of activities and diverted it to ICE’s mass deportation schemes.

Reading between the lines, the package is a defeatist acknowledgment by the Trump administration that Republicans will lose either the House, the Senate, or both in November, and that they’ll never get a no-strings-attached dime for ICE or CBP through the normal appropriations process again. But if a ruling party can just approve future funding for a long period of time, it doesn’t matter who gets elected or what their desires are. President Trump can spend 2027 and 2028 vetoing any changes to this etched-in-stone appropriation, regardless of the historic unpopularity of abducting humans off the street and whisking them off to undisclosed locations.

And there’s more. Under the direction of White House budget director Russell Vought, the Trump administration has routinely taken money expressly authorized for any number of activities and diverted it to ICE’s mass deportation schemes. Again, the wishes of Congress, which constitutionally has the sole power to determine where, as well as what, the government spends, have been reduced to an afterthought, with Democrats able only to yell at Vought in congressional hearings for repeatedly breaking the law. Vought has unilaterally decided that the budget process as it exists is unconstitutional. The pliancy of a Republican Congress and a Republican Supreme Court has enabled these serial violations.

Then again, this plan to ignore Democrats, the appropriations process, and the law may not actually work, at least until the administration pulls out another made-up rule. The executive order paying DHS personnel used money from emergency funds tucked into last year’s reconciliation bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and there’s not enough to keep payroll going past May 1. But House Republicans are reluctant to pass a DHS funding bill in that time frame, even though Johnson agreed to it.

Rank-and-file House Republicans are wary of the Senate reconciliation bill, which only includes ICE and CBP appropriations, and want to pass that first before agreeing to the other DHS funding. But there are lots of complications here. Trump and Senate Republican leaders have said that the bill must stay skinny, but members at risk of losing their seats are demanding something they can take back to voters, hard-liners want provisions suppressing the vote in the name of nonexistent voter fraud, anti-government bigots want undefined “fraud prevention” actions to deny welfare spending to Black and brown people in blue cities, and hawks want to fund the misbegotten war in Iran and stuff money into the pockets of military contractors. Not to mention anti-abortion activists who want to extend a ban on Planned Parenthood funding in Medicaid that ends in July, and fiscal hawks who want to pay for ICE and CBP funding, which normally just comes out of the general budget.

Johnson is promising a third reconciliation bill (which couldn’t commerce until October 1 of an election year, so good luck) to take up some of these other priorities, but it’s unclear whether anyone will believe him. If enough holdouts oppose the ICE/CBP reconciliation bill without their pet topics, it could cause the entire bill to collapse, with no alternative to pay DHS and TSA workers.

How likely is this? The Senate did get the budget resolution done, but that’s really only round one of a ten-round boxing match. It worked last year, but panic has set in for Republicans, who hear a ticking time bomb that will go off in November. There may be too much panic to stay disciplined.

But assuming that Trump and the Republicans are backed into a corner on spending, when everything they’ve done since Inauguration Day 2025 has been rampantly illegal, isn’t a smart analysis. Maybe they’ll decide that the tariff money they’re supposed to be giving back to businesses can be used for TSA, or that they can just use national park receipts, or who knows. In an environment where nobody has raised an objection to illegal spending, you should expect more illegal spending.

Of course, all these machinations are just substitutes for eliminating the Senate filibuster on legislation. If a majority ruled in Congress, appropriations would reflect prior electoral success. Maybe appropriators, who are given vast authority within the current system, wouldn’t like it, but the leadership has knuckled them under on DHS, and will do the same whenever it suits them. No act of Congress or the Constitution made the appropriators super-legislators, anyway.

Yes, there would be a different process if the government wasn’t unified and could not ignore the opposing party. In the current circumstance, as Daniel Schuman points out, Trump has doubled down every time he’s been challenged, inventing new ways to evade having to deal with the Senate Democrats’ ability to deny any bill the 60-vote supermajority. “A House that more aggressively exercises its oversight and appropriations powers would likely raise the stakes, not lower them,” Schuman writes. That may change with a non-sociopathic president, but the filibuster raises too much need for Trump-like evasions to get anything done, especially now that there’s a precedent.

The key point to me is that the filibuster is actually a tool for more lawlessness, as politicians scheme to find a way around it. Everything becomes far less accountable: The oversight mechanisms on the budget don’t exist in reconciliation, and the rescission process that enables party-line cancellation of spending doesn’t have a check either.

A majority-rule legislature where the president is more like a prime minister has the benefit of being coherent, enabling the public to assess the changes and signal approval or disapproval. What we have now is an endless race to find loopholes and reinterpretations of the law, or just to break it. Nothing about this is sustainable.

EmbarrassedReality88 on April 27th, 2026 at 15:33 UTC »

The founding fathers literally gave congress the power of the purse specifically to prevent an unchecked executive. but when you have an administration that blatantly ignores the law to fund their ice deportation schemes, and a legislature too spineless to actually hold them accountable, we're just watching the transition to authoritarianism in real time.

ThisOneFuqqs on April 27th, 2026 at 15:31 UTC »

As Project 2025 foretold

Colonel-Mooseknuckle on April 27th, 2026 at 15:25 UTC »

I wouldn't describe their refusal to do anything to help the American people as, "irrelevant".