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reconciliation bill
The $72 Billion Power Grab: How Republicans Are Using a Budget Trick to Build Trump's Personal Deportation Force — and How Congress Can Still Stop It
Alex Pretti, also 37 years old, an intensive-care nurse, was holding a smartphone—what Jon Stewart, in the kind of bitter eulogy that has lately become the medium for social media’s truth-telling, called “a 1080p, 60fps weapon of mass illumination”—when two Border Patrol agents, whose identities the federal government still refuses to release, shot him dead. Federal immigration officers have shot at least 14 people in the United States between September and February. Four are dead. No officer has been charged. Soon, the United States Congress will move to pass another $72-billion package—nearly all of it for the agencies that killed them and the immigration enforcement apparatus around them—on a procedural track designed expressly to bypass the majority of Americans who do not want this.
The track is called reconciliation. Created in 1974 for narrow fiscal adjustments, it allows the majority party to pass certain budget legislation with 51 votes instead of the 60 otherwise needed to overcome a filibuster. It has been steadily stretched into a vehicle for major policy, and this time the policy is the funding of an enforcement operation that has killed US citizens—with no Democratic input and no accountability reforms attached.
Signs memorializing Renee Good and Alex Pretti are seen pasted to the wall of a building on February 12, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
The pending bill also tucks in $1 billion for the Secret Service to add security features to the ballroom President Donald Trump has been building at the White House. Read that again. Seventy-one billion dollars for the agencies Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, has accurately called “a personal paramilitary unit of the president”—and the immigration enforcement apparatus around them. One billion to harden the walls of the room where the architects of this oppressive system will raise glasses to one another.
What can be done? The odds are against stopping the bill outright—but the procedural fight is already producing results. One lever is the Byrd Rule, a 1985 Senate procedure that bars reconciliation bills from including provisions whose policy effect outweighs their budget effect, or that fall outside the relevant committee’s jurisdiction. The pre-floor adjudication is called the Byrd Bath, and it is the minority’s most powerful tool against a reconciliation bill. Last week, Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised that core sections of the bill—including most of the Customs and Border Protection funding and a provision that would undermine Flores Settlement protections for unaccompanied immigrant children—violate the Byrd Rule. Over the weekend, she ruled that the $1 billion in ballroom security money does too.
Beyond Byrd Rule challenges, Democrats can force costly amendment votes during the vote-a-rama (the marathon amendment voting that follows the 24-hour debate clock), refuse the unanimous consent agreements that would compress the procedure, and use every floor hour to make this vote painful for those who cast it. Democrats plan to use those amendments to tie the package to the unauthorized Iran war and the ballroom—putting Republicans on record on all three at once. Whether they will is a question worth asking—directly, by phone, in volume—of every Democratic senator before the floor vote. It is also worth asking the two Republican senators who voted against the budget resolution last month, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky, to hold the line on the substantive vote. And it is worth asking Sen. Susan Collins of Maine—who chairs Appropriations and is in the fight of her political life for reelection this November—whether she wants the vote her constituents remember in October to be a vote for this.
Gregory Bovino, the Commander-at-Large stands around the scene where ICE agents fatally shoot a woman earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, on January 7, 2026. (Photo by Christopher Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The House, where the bill must also pass, offers Republicans almost no margin for error. With one of the thinnest majorities in recent memory and several seats currently vacant, a small number of Republican defections—if Democrats hold together—would be enough to sink the bill.
The members worth calling are not only the obvious ones—the moderates and Latino-district Republicans whose constituents are already being targeted by the agencies this bill funds—but the Democrats whose offices need to hear, the same thing they heard from voters in January and February: that this is intolerable, that the silence of decent people in the face of it is intolerable, that the elected representative who does not, in this moment, expend every iota of political capital available to them is not in fact representing anyone whose vote they should expect to receive again.
This is what is happening: an agency whose officer shot a poet through her windshield is about to receive an appropriation of historic size, through a process designed to insulate the appropriation from democratic accountability, in a bill that also funds a ballroom. There is a way to oppose it. The way requires phone calls and every other form of direct action. They have to start now.
Call the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for your senators and your representative. Tell them to vote no, and to use every procedural tool available—e.g. Byrd Rule challenges, vote-a-rama amendments, refusal of unanimous consent—to slow, shape, and defeat this bill. Tell them this: funding the agencies that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, without reform, without accountability, on a track designed to escape consent, is not something you will forget at the next election.
'No Billionaire Left Behind' in Trump Budget Request That Trashes Workers, Struggling Families
Murray added that, for Trump, "it’s no billionaire left behind—and good luck to everyone else."
As his Republican allies in Congress continued work on a major reconciliation bill that would offer sweeping tax cuts to the nation's corporate giants and wealthiest Americans while gutting Medicaid and food assistance programs for the poor, the more detailed budget request from Trump offers a deeper look into the far-right president's desired slash-and-burn approach to the nation's social safety net, valued programs, and key institutions relied upon by tens of millions.
While the topline target of the Trump proposal aims to cut $163 billion from the 2026 fiscal budget, a lack of critical details withheld by the White House appears to be part of a concerted effort to limit public outrage over the impact it would have—on people and communities as well as the overall economy. As the Washington Post's Jeff Stein explains:
With little fanfare, the budget office released 1,224 pages that spell out its spending plans in detail, expanding on the abbreviated "skinny budget" it unveiled this month. So far, though, the administration has addressed only the portion of federal outlays known as discretionary spending, which doesn't cover programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that make up the bulk of the federal budget.
Typically, the White House releases a comprehensive budget proposal each year that provides 10-year estimates of federal spending, revenue and deficits, as well as projections of economic growth, interest rates and other important indexes. These numbers are hotly contested and typically initiate a debate over the White House's priorities. But the Trump administration appears to be trying to avoid that debate, at least for now, by ignoring the traditional process for releasing a budget.
However, slashed funding for key programs is clear throughout the documents released by the administration, with cuts to healthcare initiatives, public education, student loan support, environmental and labor protections, food aid, and housing assistance for low-income Americans among the most prominent.
According to the New York Times:
The updated budget reiterated the president's pursuit of deep reductions for nearly every major federal agency, reserving its steepest cuts for foreign aid, medical research, tax enforcement and a slew of anti-poverty programs, including rental assistance. The White House restated its plan to seek a $33 billion cut at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, and another $33 billion reduction at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Targeting the Education Department, the president again put forward a roughly $12 billion cut, seeking to eliminate dozens of programs while unveiling new changes to Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.
Sharon Parrott, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), said the updated request "confirms once again that the president continues to break his promises to lower families' costs and help people who are struggling to make ends meet."
Parrott emphasized that the updated Trump budget request cannot be separated from what the GOP are trying to push through Congress in their spending package.
"To get the full picture of the administration's harmful agenda requires including the Trump-backed bill under consideration in Congress, which gives massive tax cuts to the wealthy, partly paid for by raising costs and taking away health coverage and food assistance from millions," explained Parrott. "Policymakers of both parties in Congress need to see this budget, and this entire agenda, for what it is—an irresponsible tax giveaway at the expense of everyday families and investments in our future—and plan a better course for the country."
An estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which examined an earlier version of Trump's budget, forecasted that the plan would add over $2 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade.
Rep. Brendan F. Boyle (D-Pa.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee, decried the budget request update as a "half-baked proposal" which only serves to prove Trump's determination "to make life harder for struggling families" nationwide.
" Republicans are already pushing a bill that would inflict the largest losses of health care coverage and food assistance in our nation's history," added Boyle. "This funding request goes even further, decimating critical public- and mental-health programs and slashing housing aid, home-energy support, and job-training grants. Republicans will claim these cuts are about fiscal responsibility, yet they're happy to add trillions to the deficit to shower billionaires with tax breaks."
For his part, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), vowed committed opposition from his party in the upper chamber.
"Trump's radical 2026 budget would be a gut punch to working families and a windfall for billionaires—raising prices for American families while hollowing out the programs critical to families across the country," Schumer said on Saturday. "Senate Democrats will never let it become law."
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