The House Republicans and their Senate counterparts are at odds over the best legislative strategy for carrying out President Donald Trump’s agenda. The drama showcases congressional Republicans’ determination to pretend that things in Washington are business as usual. But the intraparty squabble comes as the new administration has shown little interest in following whatever spending plan Congress eventually passes. In the process, the Capitol building has become little more than a Potemkin village, where MAGA Republicans playact as legislators.
At the heart of the debate between the two chambers, which began back in December, is how to use a process that lets spending bills bypass a filibuster in the Senate. The House is following Trump’s desire for “one big, beautiful bill” that funds his immigration, defense and energy policies, and also extends a slew of tax cuts from 2017, which are due to expire at the end of the year. But Senate Republicans believe it makes more sense to split those bills in two, giving Trump an early win while leaving the heavy lift of taxes for later in the year.
The Capitol building has become little more than a Potemkin village, where MAGA Republicans playact as legislators.
The back and forth over timing has led to GOP leadership butting heads over which chamber needs to act first. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his leadership team have stressed that they can currently only lose the support of two members in the face of united opposition from Democrats. But the far-right House Freedom Caucus (which has roughly 30 members) is pushing the same two-bill strategy as the Senate and calling for far deeper spending cuts than some of the more moderate House Republicans can stomach.
Rather than wait for the House to make up its mind, the Senate Budget Committee is moving forward a budget resolution that will be marked up and voted on over the next two days. The House is meanwhile racing to come to its own budget agreement that satisfies all parties ahead of a March 14 deadline to avert a government shutdown. And whichever budget framework prevails then must become the 12 appropriations bills that fund the various parts of the federal government.
But bluster and discord on Capitol Hill are normal. What’s going on at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, on the other hand, is very much not. While Republicans on Capitol Hill argue, the Trump administration has opted to see how much control over federal spending it can seize from Congress.
At issue is whether the president can hold back, or “impound,” funds that Congress has appropriated. The administration, led by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, thinks a 1974 law prohibiting impoundment is unconstitutional. But rather than confront that legislation head on, the White House has danced around it, claiming that any pauses in funding are only temporary freezes to allow for their review.
The most overt move came two weeks ago when OMB issued a governmentwide funding halt, arguably to allow agencies to hunt out grants and loans that went against Trump’s early executive orders attacking diversity and other “woke” priorities. But despite the memo’s swift recission, administration officials at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies have continued to hold back funding. NBC News reported Tuesday that an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency specifically told her team to “freeze funding for grant programs going back several years” in defiance of numerous court orders to lift any hold on appropriated funds.
Meanwhile, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, headed by unelected billionaire Elon Musk, has presented itself on paper as an IT department on steroids. Instead, DOGE staffers have gained access to critical systems, including those within the Treasury Department that handles the disbursement of federal payments. In the case of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the administration has illegally sought to dismantle, DOGE staffers at the Treasury specifically requested the ability to cut off funding.
What we’re seeing play out on the Hill then is little more than a grotesque pantomime of a legislature.
Five Treasury secretaries warned, in an op-ed published in The New York Times on Tuesday, of the danger to democracy that comes from having the executive branch “make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not.” But then you have FEMA’s acting head posting on X that he was shutting off any payments to migrant housing in New York even as he acknowledged that Congress had approved the spending. It is a direct rejection of lawmakers' constitutional role in determining the country’s priorities.
New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore recently noted that Trump’s disinterest in stepping in to resolve the “one bill-two bill” debate implies that he may be pleased by the GOP’s trifecta in Washington “not because he would have allies to help him govern but because he could order Congress to stay out of the way as he expanded executive powers to the absolute limit.” So far, no Republicans in Congress have shown much interest in dissuading anyone of that suggestion. Johnson and other GOP congressional leaders have defended Trump’s decisions and Musk’s efforts when asked about the numerous cases filed against those actions in federal courts. Any muted protest of this usurpation of their authority has been kept behind closed doors, as CNN recently reported, while power slips away from what was meant to be the most powerful branch of the government.
What we’re seeing play out on the Hill then is little more than a grotesque pantomime of a legislature. Republicans who have long promised spending cuts and then balked when asked for specifics will now be able to simply pretend to do their jobs while letting Trump and Musk’s cronies get their hands dirty. If their own constituents are eventually hurt in the process, lawmakers will be able to shake their heads sympathetically while passing the buck. It’s a short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating position — if you want Americans’ vote for their representative or senator to have any meaning beyond a popularity contest, that is.
