Day: January 28, 2026
Appropriations talk, executive orders walk: The great MAGA budget betrayal
Money talks. Everything else is just BS. That is true in all areas of life, but it’s especially true in politics.
Trump is now repeating the modus operandi of his first term, in which he proclaims bold cuts, reforms, and changes to federal policies, programs, and agency spending levels in the form of executive orders. He summarily ignores his own policies by lobbying Republicans in Congress to pass annual appropriations bills that fund pretty much every spending level and most policies of his predecessor — so much so that most of these bills garner support from all but the most radical Democrats in Congress.
This bill is the crown jewel budget bill of the GOP trifecta at the peak of Trump’s power, and yet Democrats have no concerns voting for it.
Unfortunately, it is the government funding that matters when attempting to secure permanent change to federal agencies, not ephemeral executive orders or press releases.
On Friday, House Republicans passed a minibus bill with all but the 64 most progressive of the 213 Democrats voting yes. The fact that the 24 most conservative Republicans opposed it despite pressure from the administration should tell you that it does not reflect Trump’s campaign promises.
This minibus included Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development. Trump has proposed hundreds of policies throughout those departments that are extremely offensive to Democrats, yet they had no problem supporting the budget bill. Why?
They feel they dodged a bullet in this funding bill, especially while being out of power. The statement from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, says it all:
These bills invest in working people across the country and utterly reject President Trump’s plan to defund our kids’ education, evict millions of families, and slash lifesaving medical research nearly in half. The message to President Trump is: America will continue to fund cancer research, we are going to keep investing in affordable housing and tackling homelessness, Congress will not abolish the Department of Education, and the people’s representatives will have the final say on how taxpayer dollars get spent.
…
While there’s a whole lot more I wish these bills would have addressed, these compromise bills protect critical investments in the American people, reject truly heartless cuts that would have undone decades of progress — and they are a significantly better outcome than another yearlong CR. I look forward to ensuring they get signed into law.
This bill is the crown jewel budget bill of the GOP trifecta at the peak of Trump’s power, and yet Democrats not only have no concerns voting for it but enthusiastically support it. What gives?
The DOGE appears to be a fossil from a hundred years ago. The $1.25 trillion “minibus” bill reversed all the DOGE cuts to agencies like the NIH and CDC. Overall, spending will increase slightly over Biden’s final year — a year that was notorious for biblical levels of spending.
Here are some of the top concerns with the FY 2026 budget bill.
- It fully funds the Department of Education. Even as Trump “abolished” the entire department, this bill funds the department at Biden’s level of $78.7 billion. Worse, Democrats secured a provision prohibiting the administration from transferring Education Department funds to other agencies, which had been a point of contention in negotiations. Once again, appropriations talk, executive orders walk.
- According to a Democrat summary of the bill, the total funding for the Labor-HHS-Education portion of the bill is $224 billion, a slight increase in current levels. This is simply astounding given that Republicans never believed in even having these departments at the federal level. If we can’t cut from these agencies, then where will we cut?
- Section 8 galore! Well, what’s worse than locking in Biden’s education and health spending? Increasing Biden’s HUD spending by nearly $8 billion! If there was ever a department conservatives wanted to abolish, it was always HUD. This is something that should be determined at the local level. Once again, Trump promised to cut the department in half, yet increased spending for every program he planned to trim or eliminate.
The bill provides $38.4 billion in tenant-based Section 8 vouchers and a $2.4 billion increase from fiscal 2025. It also provides $18.5 billion for project-based rental assistance, a $1.7 billion increase from last year.
The bill also provides $1.25 billion for HUD’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program, after the Trump administration budget request and the original Republican House Transportation-HUD appropriations bill promised to eliminate the program. These programs provide grants to state and local governments and local NGOs to essentially seed red states with liberal voters and ruin the character of rural communities.
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Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The bill also provides nearly $7 billion for the Community Development Block Grant Program and the Economic Development Initiatives for housing-related activities and $86 million for fair housing programs. Trump promised for years to eliminate the program altogether.
The only point of contention in the bill is the DHS portion, which Democrats are now threatening to oppose. But let’s be clear: Before the fatal shooting in Minneapolis, they were even willing to pass Trump’s DHS bill and did not perceive it as much of a threat.
At the time the bill was released, Senator Murray boasted that Democrats “defeated Republicans’ hard-fought push to give ICE an even bigger annual budget, successfully cut ICE’s detention budget and capacity, cut CBP’s budget by over $1 billion, and secured important, although still insufficient, new constraints on DHS.” She also lauded the rejection of “all Republican poison pill riders,” such as defunding sanctuary cities.
Democrats are, of course, forced to play to their base. However, on the specifics, this bill contains some horrendous provisions.
- Cheap foreign labor: It allows the secretary to double H-2B visas, going from 66,000 to 130,000 H-2B visas.
- Prohibits ICE from deporting illegal aliens who sponsor unaccompanied minors based on any information provided by HHS. So HHS is supposed to vet the sponsors, but if it determines they are here illegally and tells ICE that, ICE is prohibited from deporting them.
Why would we double foreign worker visas and make it harder to remove those literally engaged in trafficking children over the border by hiring cartel smugglers?
Well, despite all the rhetoric, press releases, tweets, and executive orders, good ol’ Joe Biden had it right when he proclaimed, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Evidently, we are now valuing almost everything all that he funded in his budget when he made that comment.
How the military is computing the killing chain
In 2025, the nomenclature caught up with the reality. For decades, the United States had operated under the fiction of a Department of Defense, a name that suggested protection, reaction, and a reluctance to engage. When Secretary Pete Hegseth signed the memoranda that would redefine the American military for the algorithmic age, the letterhead had changed. It was the Department of War again.
The revival of the old title was not merely cosmetic. It was an unapologetic signal, a shift from a defensive posture to a mission-focused one. Then between late 2025 and early 2026, Hegseth released a flurry of new memos announcing that the United States intended to become an “AI-first” war-fighting force. The language was clipped, urgent, and devoid of the hand-wringing that usually accompanies the introduction of new lethal means. The department now treats AI not as a support tool but as a core element of warfare, intelligence, and organizational power.
There is a simulation engine that alludes without irony to Orson Scott Card’s novel about child soldiers fighting insectoid aliens.
Reading through these documents, one is struck by the anxiety of the “algorithm gap,” which echoes the “missile gap” of the Cold War, with the stakes shifted from megatonnage to processing speed. The prevailing sentiment is that falling behind an adversary’s AI capabilities would be as catastrophic as falling behind in nuclear weapons. The Department of War does not intend to be a laggard. “Speed and adaptation win,” one memo states.
To achieve this speed, the Department has declared war on its own bureaucracy. The memos speak of a “wartime approach” to innovation, dismantling the risk-averse culture that has defined Pentagon procurement for half a century. The endless committees and boards have been dissolved, replaced with a “CTO Action Group” empowered to make quick calls. The ethos is that of Silicon Valley, grafting Mark Zuckerberg’s call to “move fast and break things” onto an institution whose business is to break things in a more literal sense.
The specific initiatives, what the Department calls “Pace-Setting Projects,” read like the chapter titles of a science-fiction novel. There is “Swarm Forge,” a project designed to pair elite war-fighters with technologists to experiment with drone swarms. There is “Ender’s Foundry,” a simulation engine meant to war-game against AI adversaries, a name that alludes without irony to Orson Scott Card’s novel about child soldiers fighting insectoid aliens. There is “Open Arsenal,” which promises to turn intelligence into weapons in hours rather than years.
Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images
What is being built here is “civil-military fusion,” a concept the Chinese have long championed and which the United States is now adopting with a convert’s zeal. The Department is actively courting the private sector, mentioning commercial AI models such as Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok. It is bringing in tech executives to run the show, with a new chief technology officer empowered to clear bureaucratic blockers.
The transformation is not limited to the battlefield but permeates the “enterprise,” a sterile word for the three million personnel who make up the Department’s nervous system. The vision is total: Under a program called GenAI.mil, every analyst, logistician, and staff officer will be issued a secure AI assistant to draft reports and code software. The goal is to embed AI systems across war-fighting, intelligence, and support functions until the distinction between soldier and data processor dissolves. The focus is on “decision superiority,” out-thinking the opponent at every turn.
The drive for decision superiority leads to a profound shift in the role of human judgment. The memos describe “Agent Network,” a project to develop AI agents for battle management “from campaign planning to kill chain execution.” They speak of “interpretable results,” a concession to the idea that humans should know why the machine decided to fire. The momentum is toward “human on the loop,” in which a human may abort an attack, rather than “human in the loop,” in which the human must initiate it. We are entering an era of “hyper-war,” in which AI systems could escalate a conflict in seconds, before a human commander can pour a cup of coffee.
The Department is betting that American ingenuity, harnessed in code, will secure the future, that it can maintain “America’s global AI dominance” through force of will and capital. The memos outline a future in which algorithms join soldiers on the battlefield, data platforms become as crucial as tanks, and decisions are increasingly informed by machines. It is a grand experiment in efficiency. We have decided that if warfare is now a battle of algorithms, we intend to algorithmically outgun the world. The name on the building has changed to reflect the reality: We are no longer defending. We are computing the kill.
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