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.
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.
For congressional Republicans, that allows them to hold airport security hostage for their wildly unpopular immigration project. For congressional Democrats, it forces them to imperil airport security funding while attempting to rein in ICE (which already had much of its funding specially protected by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”).
Of course, here in the real world, there’s no actual reason for airport security funding to have anything to do with immigration police funding. Congress could come together and easily fix this problem. Lawmakers could delink the two by simply separating TSA funding from ICE funding — either by putting the former in the Transportation Department appropriations bill or by suspending procedural rules so that we fund airport security while everyone still fights about ICE.
But a recent Senate vote suggests Republicans don’t actually want that. They want the airport security that everyone supports to be contingent on an unrelated and out-of-control immigration crackdown that most Americans do not support. In doing so, they reinforce a stealthily ideological appropriations procedure that is rarely scrutinized but creates a false choice that guarantees the hostage situation they desire.
The Appropriations Game
This example is not an anomaly — it’s emblematic of the entire spending process across the twelve annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government’s discretionary programs.
For instance, have you noticed how there’s a giant Defense Appropriations Bill, now approaching $1 trillion? And have you noticed how that legislation is separate from every other appropriations bill funding every other priority in America? That separation is intentional. It makes it extremely difficult for any rank-and-file member of Congress to propose — and secure votes on — simple measures to shift money out of the Pentagon and into other priorities.
In the annual appropriations process, congressional rules typically only allow lawmakers to propose floor amendments that move money within a single bill — not across separate bills. In practice, that means when the Defense Appropriations Bill comes to the House floor, your member of Congress cannot force a vote on shifting money out of the Pentagon’s war operations and into, say, veterans’ health care.
Why? Because veterans’ health care is funded through a different appropriations bill. The same constraint applies to other priorities: lawmakers cannot easily redirect war spending into alternative uses that could be funded with the same amount of money.
Similarly, let’s say you’re a lawmaker who wants to strip funding from the Justice Department’s private prison projects and put that money into the Department of Labor’s enforcement of workplace safety laws.
The amendment would be ruled out of order before there’s even a vote because it spans two separate bills: Justice Department funding is in the Commerce-Justice-State appropriations bill, while Labor Department funding is in the Labor–Health and Human Services appropriations bill.
If you want to increase that Labor Department funding, you’re gonna have to raid money from Health and Human Services’s public health programs.
Exposing the Superstructure
OK, I’m oversimplifying just a bit here. It’s true that each year, before the appropriations bills move forward, Congress passes a budget resolution that sets caps and spending goals among topline government functions. The appropriations bills are then supposed to operate within that framework. Some of these trade-offs are debated at that stage.
But the appropriations bills are where the real power lies. How those bills are divvied up — which programs are separated and which are grouped together — is not random. Nor are the rules governing which amendments are allowed and not allowed by House and Senate procedures. The superstructure of the spending process makes some policy changes easier and others far more difficult.
The rules of the process are ideological and intentional, and they all but guarantee the policy outcomes desired by the oligarchs and corporations that have turned elections into auctions.
These rules also give lawmakers a convenient excuse for inaction: they can all insist they really wanted to do popular things that might offend their donors, but they were blocked by procedure.
They rely on us all not knowing that, when they’re in the majority, they could fix those procedures.
To be sure, creative lawmakers can still find glitches inside this rigged appropriations matrix. Bernie Sanders and his aides Jeff Weaver and Warren Gunnels turned appropriations riders into an art form when Sanders was in the House, earning him the title of Congress’s “amendment king.”
But glitches in the matrix are not a long-term solution.
If we want different outcomes — if we want a government whose priorities better reflect the public’s — this superstructure needs the 99% Invisible treatment. It must be made visible. It must be brought out of the shadows and scrutinized. It should be viewed as not just some boring apolitical process but as a deeply political scheme that shapes the entire way our government makes decisions about how public priorities are funded — and which ones are not.
This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.