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…
Auteur: David Sirota
