Cuts That Follow the Vote, Checks That Await It

The most candid sentence in the administration's budget record came from a judge. In January, ruling on the cancellation of $7.6 billion in clean-energy grants, Judge Amit Mehta noted that sixteen states lost their money and that all sixteen had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, a pattern he held to violate equal protection. What made the ruling unusual was not the finding. It was the defense. ^[1]

Defendants freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily — if not exclusively — based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024. — Amit Mehta

The president had made the same point himself, from a stage, three months earlier. His administration froze $11 billion in Army Corps and transit projects concentrated in Democratic regions, with the budget office citing sanctuary jurisdictions, the places that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, and he explained the freeze to a crowd. ^[2]

They didn't realize that gives me the right to cut programs that Republicans never wanted. — Donald Trump

One admission was entered in court. The other played to a rally. They agree, and the months since have filled in the scale. A tally published this past week puts the second term's grant cuts and freezes at up to $177 billion across all fifty states, close to a tenth of the money Congress votes on each year, with the deepest damage in health care, nutrition, environmental programs, and disaster relief. ^[3] This month the administration reprogrammed $52 million in foreign military financing (reprogramming being the bureaucratic term for moving money Congress approved for one purpose to another), away from Slovakia, North Macedonia, Tunisia, and Iraq, and toward the governments of Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. ^[4] Impoundment is the next tool: a president declining to spend money Congress has appropriated — the practice the 1974 Impoundment Control Act was written to curb. The Office of Management and Budget has withheld billions for low-income housing, education, and medical research until agencies submit spending plans aligned with executive priorities, and its director, Russell Vought, has told Congress he agrees with the president that the 1974 law itself is unconstitutional. ^[5] Then there is the pocket rescission: letting appropriated money lapse unspent at the fiscal year's end, without the congressional vote the law requires. The Government Accountability Office has ruled that a violation; the budget office insists the law allows it. ^[6] Some of the taking is almost decorative. The National Park Service has moved $67 million in entrance fees, gate money meant for upkeep of the parks it comes from, into ornamental projects in Washington, fountains and gold-leaf regilding among them, while some 1,500 maintenance projects sit stalled across the park system. At some sites the workforce is down by a fifth or more, and $25 million in conservation agreements has been canceled. ^[7] And some of it is nearly too small to notice. The giving gets better staging. At a White House "Celebration of Agriculture" in March, the president stood before farmers who had been absorbing the costs of his own trade war and announced a second $12 billion in relief. ^[8]

I just gave you $12 billion — Donald Trump

It was the second helping. A first round, with payments capped at $155,000, had gone out as Farmer Bridge Assistance with checks deposited by February. ^[9] Both rounds paid farmers for damage the administration's own tariffs had done to their markets, and the president's account of the funding did not survive his agriculture secretary: the checks were drawn on the borrowing authority of the Commodity Credit Corporation, not on tariff revenue. ^[8][9] The rest of the giving column filled in this month, too. The tax law signed this week lifts the average refund to $3,276, up 11.5 percent. ^[10] And on the largest promise of all, the $5,000 dividend, the president has said repeatedly that he can send the checks without asking Congress. ^[11] His Treasury Secretary keeps saying otherwise.

we need legislation for that. — Scott Bessent

Both corrections were delivered in public, one about the source of the farm money and one about the machinery of the dividend. Set side by side — the grants terminated by electoral map, the frozen transit money, the military aid rerouted toward aligned governments, the housing money held back until agencies promise to spend it the president's way — the taking has a direction the administration has admitted in court. The giving has a direction too, and it runs toward the mailbox: a farm celebration, a fatter refund line, a check with the president's name in its nickname. This is not austerity in one column and generosity in another. It is one operation, pulling money back from institutions and, case by admitted case, from the other party's states, and pushing it toward voters in forms they can see, hold, and deposit. The $5,000 promise is that operation's headline, and its arithmetic deserves a slow walk. It started last October as a $2,000 "tariff dividend." ^[12] It now stands at $5,000 for every adult citizen, at an estimated cost of $1.2 trillion to $1.6 trillion, and the president says the country can easily handle the bill because of all the tariff money coming in. ^[13] Measured one source at a time, no source named for the check covers it. Start with the money he names first. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress's official scorekeeper, has already cut its ten-year forecast of tariff revenue by $1 trillion, to $3 trillion, and says even the larger figure may not cover the deficit the tax law adds. ^[14] By the Tax Foundation's math, the customs duties actually being collected would cover a fraction of the check. ^[13] Then there are the savings. The cost-cutting office, DOGE, closed on the Fourth of July after eighteen months, claiming $215 billion in savings against a $2 trillion target. Congress enacted $8 to $9 billion of its proposed cuts, no official accounting will be released, and agencies are now rehiring for positions it eliminated. ^[15] The part of the savings that became law is under 1 percent of the check's cheapest price. The third source is a stock price. The government bought a 10 percent stake in Intel for $8.9 billion, with money taken from the CHIPS and Science Act and related semiconductor programs, and the president touts a $30 billion gain on the holding. That is a paper gain: market value on a given day, real only if the shares are sold, spendable exactly once. ^[16] It is the funding story for a promise at least forty times its size. The fourth arrived this week. All fifty states, the president announced, have joined the Medicaid drug-pricing program, and he put the savings at $529 billion over ten years, money that lands in state budgets. ^[17] He had a description of what it is for.

This one thing alone should win us the midterms. — Donald Trump

Stack those four in one sentence and they sound like a plan. Take them one at a time, which is the only honest way to take a funding claim, and each falls short: a forecast already cut and already spoken for; savings that exist mostly as a press release; a one-time paper gain; ten years of drug money sitting in someone else's budget. About what the check is for, the president has now said both things.

Five thousand dollars to all adults in the country and we can easily handle that because we're taking in so much money. — Donald Trump

Days later, at the drug-pricing announcement that added the newest source to the list, he said the other.

every state will have the ability to use those extra billions of dollars to invest in other healthcare improvements or something else. — Donald Trump

The promise's own terms are less shy. The $5,000 goes out only if Republicans keep the House and Senate on November 3. ^[13] None of this runs unopposed. The deficit did narrow, 15 percent in the first quarter of the fiscal year, to $602 billion, on record revenue of $1.2 trillion, with customs duties up from $23 billion to $94 billion. ^[18] When the administration terminated roughly 2,000 mental-health and addiction grants, worth $2 billion, on a single January day, bipartisan pressure restored the money within 24 hours. ^[19] In December, federal courts ordered the Department of Homeland Security to return $233 million in disaster and counterterrorism grants it had stripped from sanctuary jurisdictions; a judge called the cuts an unconscionable abuse of power and noted they had been trimmed in conspicuously round numbers, and a second ruling restored housing money to Kentucky and nineteen other states. ^[20] The administration is appealing. Strip the dividend to its mechanism and one fact is left standing. The Treasury Secretary says the checks require an act of Congress. The president says they go out only if his party keeps Congress. Those are two descriptions of the same instrument. The funding mechanism and the enabling condition are one institution, and it is not the Treasury. The arithmetic does not resolve into a revenue stream. It resolves into the vote.