The Congressional Budget Game Is Rigged
Congressional Republicans are holding airport security funding hostage to get more money for ICE. The situation is possible because of the federal appropriations process, which makes some federal spending changes easier and others far more difficult.
Congress’s annual appropriations procedure should be viewed not as a boring apolitical process but as a deeply political scheme that shapes the entire way our government makes decisions about which public priorities are funded — and which are not. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
One of my favorite podcasts is 99% Invisible, whose premise is that so much of our existence is shaped not by the attention-grabbing spectacles in our foregrounds but by the infrastructures and superstructures we barely notice in the background.
In national politics, federal spending bills exemplify this dynamic, as I learned while working on the House Appropriations Committee. How those bills are structured is rarely ever discussed or interrogated — yet as we’re seeing right now, those decisions are deeply ideological and determinative of policy outcomes.
Consider the budget fight over airport security and immigration enforcement. Notice how funding for the completely uncontroversial Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is yoked to funding for the highly controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). That is, in part, because both agencies are funded through the Homeland Security Appropriations bill.
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