After the shutdown deal, Trump has gone right back to withholding funds and dismantling appropriated entities.**Click to view this email in your browser.**

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DECEMBER 17, 2025

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****DAYEN ON TAP****

**Constitutional softball: Congress gives up its power of the purse**

**After the shutdown deal, Trump has gone right back to withholding funds and dismantling appropriated entities.**

The $900 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which has now **passed the House** [link removed] and **Senate** [link removed], attempts to push Pete Hegseth to release the full “double-tap” video of the summary execution of fishermen in the Caribbean Sea. Hegseth has thus far **shown defiance** [link removed], saying he will never release the full video for all members of Congress to see.

The NDAA isn’t likely to force Hegseth’s hand, because the consequences are so meager. First of all, the **language of the text** [link removed] only asks that Hegseth hand the unedited video to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which are already seeing the video today. Second, the punishment for failing to provide the video is a loss of one-quarter of the defense secretary’s travel budget. (The NDAA also requires the Pentagon to issue overdue reports, including on Ukraine, before releasing the full travel budget.)

As stewards of the power of the purse, Congress could have increased the withholding of the travel budget to 100 percent, or conditioned other military appropriations on the video release (like troop pay, barracks construction, or weapons upgrades), or could have required a full showing to both Congress

**and** the public. But it opted for constitutional softball, not hardball.

This weakness has real consequences. As Trump and Russ Vought intuit that Congress will not sanction misbehavior, they are given license to keep doing it. Appropriations to end the government shutdown in November contained only minimal strings attached to funding. Predictably, the Trump administration has gone right back to withholding duly appropriated funds and threatening states that don’t comply with their demands.

Throughout November, **governors** [link removed] and **lawmakers** [link removed] were screaming about unreleased funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP); finally, after Thanksgiving, the Health and Human Services Department **got around to providing $3.6 billion** [link removed]. The Department of Transportation continues to withhold funding for electric-vehicle infrastructure, triggering a **lawsuit by 16 states** [link removed] filed earlier this week.

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The Agriculture Department is **vowing to remove administrative funding** [link removed] for states that fail to turn over personal information of recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This blackmail was blocked by a federal judge, but Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is moving forward anyway. Yesterday, the Office of Management and Budget announced it would **break up** [link removed] the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, seeming payback for the state not adhering to a plainly illegal pardon of a former local elections official on state crimes. NCAR **receives appropriated funding** [link removed], and dismantling it violates that appropriation. But Congress didn’t punish such withholdings, so they continue.

The appropriations bill did restrict using funding to fire federal employees, and required that employees fired illegally during the shutdown be reinstated. But employees who got a reduction in force notice before the shutdown began were still let go, like some **State Department employees** [link removed] (who received word of layoffs in July) and a **couple hundred General Services Administration employees** [link removed]. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who wrote the provision in the appropriations bill, argued that layoffs not completed by October 1 needed to be halted, since no money could be used to implement those layoffs. But there weren’t conditions or triggers (like killing the president’s travel budget) attached to this potential violation, so it’s back to the courts, while laid-off workers and the government they used to serve suffer.

Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs is in the midst of **planning large reductions** [link removed] to its workforce, primarily through eliminating unfilled vacancies. But they are telling regional offices to identify openings to be canceled, which certainly sounds like using appropriated money to effectuate reductions in the workforce—the very thing that the shutdown deal restricted. There’s also talk of reducing staff at those regional offices, which most certainly would look like a violation.

The administration is basically saying to Congress, “Whaddya gonna do about it?” There has been scattered success at restoring grants in the courts, like the **Institute of Museum and Library Services funding** [link removed] that was restored in early December. But congressional Democrats had a real opportunity to leverage the power of the purse during the shutdown fight. They know how to do it, as evidenced by the quarter-step on Hegseth’s travel budget and the ban on layoffs. But instead of going further and protecting the laws they write and pass, Democrats sought to raise the salience of imminent cuts to Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies. This was politically smart but will not result in any extension, as the **House of Representatives all but confirmed** [link removed] yesterday.

Meanwhile, Trump has three years left in office, and the lesson he took from the shutdown is that Congress—including Democrats—isn’t really going to stop his assault on the separation of powers. He can and will continue to arbitrarily withhold, rescind, and play games with funding that Congress mandated and that presidents must execute. Any grantee for the duration of this presidency will have to live with constant anxiety that their next dollar won’t be coming. Congress’s failure to assert itself is pathetic.

 

David Dayen
Executive Editor

**David Dayen**
Executive Editor

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