We are just a few weeks away from another deadline on government funding, and all sides want you to know something: This will not go the way it did the last time. Nobody wants to see a replay of the longest shutdown in American history that happened last October and November. Democrats are not going to ask for an extension of Obamacare subsidies, which ran out on December 31, as a condition of passing appropriations. (There will be a House vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies on Thursday, but that’s happening outside of the government funding process.) Republicans are going to try to negotiate appropriations bills with Democrats, rather than a unilateral demand to extend current funding.
The sting of that shutdown, the subsequent Republican wipeout in special elections, and the Democratic capitulation to end the impasse have made all sides wary of disrupting the flow of government funding.
Well, almost all sides.
Because on Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services froze $10 billion in funding for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, the Child Care and Development Fund, and other social services for five blue states (Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois, and Colorado). This is perceived punishment for a hyped-up scandal about welfare fraud in Minnesota, which was largely prosecuted during the Biden administration but which has been resurrected by dishonest right-wing influencers, largely to press the case that all Somali Americans are stealing government funds.
It’s as if President Trump is saying, “Well if you’re not going to shut down the government, I sure will.” And at the same time, he is doing the exact same thing he accuses Somali Americans of doing, namely, taking money from child welfare programs.
All of this money being withheld was approved by Congress and signed by the president. There is nothing legal about singling out these states to deny welfare funding, based on evidence-free claims of widespread fraud. These kinds of pauses occurred hundreds of times during the first year of the administration, and they often resulted in rulings requiring the administration to stop withholding funds and violating the law. But the months of delay can debilitate fragile grantees and force closures.
In one sense, Democrats stating in advance that they would not shut down the government invites this behavior. There are clear mechanisms for Democrats to ensure that money they approve for spending actually gets spent. Congress can stop any money it approves from being used to hold up funds for individual states or programs. But without that kind of guardrail, and without putting up a fight on government funding overall, Democrats are handing over their power to Trump to baselessly screw over kids in states he doesn’t like.
The announcement comes after a pause last week of $185 million in federal child care payments specifically in Minnesota. That was more directly related to the fraud scandal, which has already collected a political scalp in the form of Gov. Tim Walz, who announced he would no longer run for re-election.
The broader $10 billion freeze is completely different. HHS made no finding of fraud in the four other states it dragooned into the situation. The withholding of funds appears to be purely driven by animus.
Yet inside Congress, which approved that funding, it’s an eerie business as usual. Three bipartisan appropriations bills were released earlier this week and will get a House vote tomorrow, generally adhering to a few but not all of the Trump administration’s requested cuts. There are some directives on how the executive branch is to spend these funds, but they are mostly standard and certainly not reflective of the continual crisis of funding delays and pauses that have characterized the past year.
There are six other funding bills outstanding, some of which might get done, some of which might get a stopgap bill as negotiations continue. But the sense of urgency amid the president unilaterally vaporizing critical funding for certain states is missing, if it ever existed.
On top of that, the administration illegally barged into a foreign country and kidnapped its leader a few days ago. Democrats have mostly confined their remarks on this to demanding briefings, a complaint akin to charging that Trump didn’t fill out the right TPS report before breaking the law. A briefing was finally held last night, with little clarity for the resolution in Venezuela.
None of the leverage of the upcoming deadline for appropriations will be used to, for example, withhold funding for further airstrikes in the Caribbean or the Venezuelan mainland through a war powers resolution. There’s a war powers vote expected in the Senate on Thursday; it’s also expected to fail. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is promising more war powers resolutions for other threatened territories like Cuba, Greenland, Mexico, and Colombia, but they will likely meet the same fate. Democrats have no power of persuasion to restrict funding here, unless they tie it to the broader appropriation deadline. Having vowed not to do that, their rhetoric is largely limp.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has been the main Democrat arguing that any agreement has to have protections against Trump’s “ability to deny money to our states.” But without leadership buy-in, that’s probably not going anywhere.
The saddest thing about this is we have precedent for how this can work. As part of the deal to end the shutdown in November, Kaine secured a rider preventing any money from being used to implement mass layoffs. Politico reports that this will likely be extended in the new funding bill. Guardrails like this tend to roll over as they become normalized.
Preventing individual states from getting singled out with funding freezes and cuts should be something every member of Congress would want to support: The next president may decide your state is next, after all. It shouldn’t be this hard to get language into law that requires a spending bill to actually spend the money it authorizes. But if Democrats won’t defend the power of the purse, it does not functionally exist.