Funding Shenanigans: In Trumpistan, The Feds Budget You

Now it seems to be such a cruel irony,
he’s richer now than he ever was before.
Now my check is spent and I can’t afford the rent;
there’s one law for the rich, one for the poor.
– “Ordinary Man”, by Peter Haynes

Today, we’re going to look at a thread from Bluesky.

Because some folks can’t just write a blog I could link to.

This dive into Trump’s attempts to pay the military, because unpaid militaries don’t support coups, comes from Bobby Kogan, the Senior Director of Federal Budget Policy for the Center for American Progress.

His posts on this thread start here.

Go ahead, read it now; we’ll wait.

Ready?

His thesis is that:

Trump’s mechanism to pay the troops during the shutdown is by far the most illegal budgetary action he’s taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything.

and:

The mechanism through which Trump is paying the troops is the most blatant large Antideficiency Act (ADA) violation in US history.

He then goes on to dissect and demonstrate that over the course of 30-some posts, concluding with:

By an entire parsec, the Trump administration has undertaken the most illegal set of budget actions in history. This is why we desperately need guardrails to restrain and go after budget malfeasance from the White House.

He is not wrong.

I’m not qualified to judge whether this is as far past the normal illegal budgetary games as he says it is, but it’s very clearly illegal on its face and equally clearly is not going to be stopped by any pieces of the federal State that still remain.

Hence: “we desperately need guardrails”.

This blog is largely about suggesting guardrails, but I’m not going to go on about any particular possible solution today. For one thing, any solution would already have to be in place to be helpful and for another that’s not the point.

The point is: we don’t do kings here.

There’s the relevance to tomorrow, and the header image above, by the way:

The president is claiming the power to not spend money he doesn’t want to and now also to spend money where it’s not allowed. And SCOTUS might say no one has standing to stop him. That would make him an appropriations king.

No need to say “appropriations king”, he’s clearly just aiming to be “king”.

And the mechanisms of the State whose job it is to stop this kind of nonsense have utterly failed.

249 years ago, the people here decided to do away with kings.

And we will not go back.