Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
President Trump wants to send to Congress a chunk of the DOGE federal funding cuts that Congress, in a properly functioning democracy, should have voted on in the first place. Its called a rescissions package, and it is a mechanism for Congress to vote to approve a small sliver of the cuts that the executive branch has already enacted without the legislative branch’s permission, as well as a request to, essentially, end all federal support for PBS and NPR, the nation’s most-well-known public media organizations. As my colleague Emine Yücel reported this week, Trump’s constitutionally backwards approach to a pretty standard executive branch-legislative branch request is designed to give an air of legitimacy to the whole DOGE operation, while also allowing Trump to get some revenge on the news media.
Reports surfaced earlier this week indicating that the White House might delay sending its formal rescissions request to Congress for a few weeks — ostensibly so that Trump could focus on strongarming House and Senate Republicans into passing his massive budget bill (with drastic cuts to Medicaid). But new reporting from WaPo Friday suggests a second problem: that some Republican members of Congress are unnerved by the idea of swallowing sweeping foreign aide cuts that the White House has lawlessly enacted on its own, some of which will reportedly be in the recessions package, without having the time to thoroughly inspect the potential ramifications of making those funding freezes law.
Democrats have, of course, been making noise about the fact that going about rescission in this manner is not only backwards constitutionally, it, more specifically, puts Trump in the position of doing Congress’ job for it. It is one of many themes of Trump’s power-grabbing second term we’ve been watching closely.
Whether Trump is truly exercising patience, allowing Congress to pass his massive fiscal agenda before he shoves some DOGE cuts down members’ throats, or whether he’s reacting to pushback from Republican members wary of ceding their authority to the executive, will likely remain unclear for a bit. What is clear is his pettiness will always win out in the end. Not content to wait on Congress to formalize his war on the press, Trump signed an executive order late Thursday night supposedly striking down federal funding for NPR and PBS. Experts are already saying that the executive order, much like the DOGE work of freezing congressionally authorized funds, is unlawful.
— Nicole Lafond
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- Emine Yücel walks us through the options for gutting Medicaid that House Republicans are currently weighing, as they negotiate over how exactly to make sweeping cuts to the program without too many Americans noticing.
- Kate Riga debunks the notion of teflon Don in the face of public opinion polling and other breaking news this week that serves as evidence for the idea that the Trump administration is not impervious to public will.
- Josh Kovensky weighs in on the government reaching a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt in their wrongful death suit, and the broader belief among those running the government that any transfer of power away from Trump is illegitimate.
Let’s dig in.
Tensions Over Medicaid Cuts Might Take Over The Reconciliation Process
As House Energy & Commerce Committee Republicans have begun their work of finding $880 billion in cuts to programs in their jurisdiction — a huge chunk of which will likely come from massive targeted cuts to Medicaid —- several different options are being floated.
One that many Republicans are getting behind is enacting Medicaid work requirements. That currently seems to be the only politically palatable option.
Other options that Republicans are mulling include reducing the federal matching rate for the Medicaid expansion population and implementing per capita caps.
The first option would reduce the current 90% federal matching rate for the expansion population, leaving states in the position of needing more funding if they want to continue covering the expansion population. Some states, which enacted trigger laws, would end their expansion coverage immediately if the federal government contribution drops. The second option would turn the federal government’s contribution into a block grant. States would receive a fixed amount from the federal government, limiting the federal government’s contribution for each Medicaid enrollee. That would mean if a state’s spending per enrollee exceeds the cap, they would be responsible for the cost.
Both options would likely result in millions of low-income and disabled Americans losing their health care coverage as states will have to figure out a way to take on the costs that the federal government has been covering up until this point.
A group of swing-district House Republicans and some GOP senators have been publicly against these two options as they say it will strip the constituents of benefits they heavily rely on.
Even with these options on the table, it appears the Republican conference is at an impasse. Following a White House meeting with President Trump and key committee chairs, House GOP leadership decided they will delay the markup for the E&C committee (as well as Ways and Means and Agriculture panels), which were initially scheduled for the upcoming week.
House GOP leadership now wants all three committees to mark up their sections of the reconciliation package the week of May 12. Unless something changes that would mean all three would mark up in the same week the Budget committee is expected to put together the massive reconciliation package using pieces from the individual panels.
For House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who is adamant the House will meet their Memorial Day deadline, the timing is getting tighter with less room for error.
— Emine Yücel
The Trump White House Is Not Impervious To Public Opinion
The Trump administration loves the machismo of the teflon Don idea — the notion that President Trump is immune to the political gravity that controls, sometimes wounds, lesser mortals.
It’s not a total fantasy: Do the old “imagine Barack Obama doing x” and sub in Trump’s attempted election theft or sexual assaults or general buffoonery, and it holds up.
But his assholery being part of his appeal is different from his supposed political invincibility. This week in particular showed that he is tethered to public opinion, even when he tries to obfuscate that reality.
A few weeks after Signalgate (the first), National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is out, shuffled over to UN Ambassador. Good Politico reporting at the time showed that even as the scandal unfurled, Trump was determined to delay the potential firing, the better to deprive liberals and the media of a scalp.
Then there was the administration’s freakout over reporting that Amazon intended to break out tariff increases from the base price of the product, providing transparency about how Trump’s policies were increasing costs. After White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it a “hostile and political act,” Amazon tripped over itself to assure the administration that it never planned to feature such transparency on its main website.
These are not the actions of a godlike administration, untouchable by the wrath of the huddled masses. They are moves you make when you’re trying to clean up a big scandal and downplay a burgeoning one.
— Kate Riga
When The Government Admits Fault
Attorneys for the family of Ashli Babbitt and the government told a federal judge on Friday that they had reached an agreement in principle to settle a wrongful death lawsuit brought by relatives of the woman who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to break through an inner barrier of the Capitol on January 6.
The amount of money the government will pay the Babbitts is unknown; attorneys only said at the hearing that all counts of the wrongful death suit would be covered by the settlement, and declined to disclose terms.
In the months and years after Jan. 6, Babbitt became a martyr for the far-right. Her sacrifice isn’t so much for those who regard Trump as the real victor in the 2020 election and more for the view that underlies it all: that any kind of loss or transfer of power away from him and his movement was, by its nature, illegitimate.
That movement is now in control of the government. It’s not surprising, in a way, that they’re setting up a situation where this government can try to ratify Babbitt’s martyrdom by repudiating the position of its predecessor. The question is where it leads. There were many officers on Jan. 6 who, in the process of defending the Capitol and the constitutional transfer of power, inflicted injuries on rioters. What happens to them?
— Josh Kovensky
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