It’s Up To Congress Now

We have been hearing for a while that the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) under the tutelage of Elon Musk has been a giant failure.

We’ve been hearing this from the legacy media, who have been saying that all the cuts are basically fake, that nothing is happening, that it’s chaos that’s wrecking the country.

It is true that not one Social Security check has been stopped. The Medicaid and the Medicare checks are also still going out. The government, unfortunately, is still running much as before.

But — much spending has really been stopped. There’s been an open question as to how much spending will be stopped, how much can be temporarily frozen versus actually just cut. Will firing these employees actually stick?

But Democrats are caterwauling because, as it turns out, DOGE has been quite effective in stopping an enormous amount of spending. Trillions of dollars? No. Is it hundreds of billions of dollars? Yes.

According to Reuters:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has so far withheld at least $436.87 billion of congressionally approved funding, the top Democrats on the U.S. Congress’ appropriation committees said on Tuesday. The frozen allotments span the federal government, according to the first estimate of the potential impoundments in the project led by Senator Patty Murray from Washington and Representative Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut. Almost $42 billion was frozen or canceled for the State Department, including the frozen support for USAID, along with another $62 billion-plus in competitive grant funding for the Transportation Department, according to the estimate. The Democrats also detailed $943 million frozen for the Head Start early-education program.

Head Start is one of the great failures in federal history. The data on Head Start has been pretty solid for a long time, showing effectively no difference between kids who go to Head Start and kids who do not. There’s also been some $10 billion frozen and canceled for the Natural Resources Conservation Service as well.

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Democrats, of course, are very angry about all of this. All of the spending is going to have to be put permanently into the “no-spend” category by Congress. They can do so with a simple 50 vote majority in the Senate. That is presumably the path Congress is going to have to take.

The focus needs to move to Congress, because the truth is that President Trump and DOGE can temporarily freeze a lot of this funding, but unless it’s rescinded by Congress, it will go right back into place after a certain period of time.

This is the reason why Democrats are freaking out about all of this.

They’re worried that Republicans are going to start passing rescission bills that would make many of the freezes permanent and then turn the freezes into cuts.

According to Reuters, “The administration has cited Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the undoing of the federal government’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as reasons for blocking congressionally approved funding.”

The question is how much the executive branch can actually block that funding under the 1974 Impoundment Control Act. Usually the president has to tweak levels by proposing cuts. That would be the rescission. That has not happened so far.

Which brings us to Congress. Right now it would be an act of political magic. Every time you get a Republican majority together, it’s a bit of political magic. The reason for that is because the Republican House majority is unbelievably narrow.

Even in the Senate of the United States, you have to acknowledge that senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are likely to go the other way on major legislation. That cuts the GOP majority to 51 votes. There are still holdovers like Mitch McConnell (D-NY), who may vote against something President Trump wants. There are a wide variety of other senators with various interests.

So getting this whole thing together is an attempt to herd cats by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), as well as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA).

Can they do it? That’s the question.