DAYEN ON TAP

The Agriculture Department is vowing to remove administrative funding 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 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, 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 (who received word of layoffs in July) and a couple hundred General Services Administration employees. 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 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 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 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.