President Trump has directed a no-bid contract for repairs to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to a firm he personally selected — one he says worked on his private swimming pool, the New York Times reports. No competitive bidding. No public solicitation. A presidential preference translated directly into a federal award for a national landmark.

The pattern has a name in American administrative history: it is called spoils contracting, and Congress spent the better part of the 20th century building procurement law specifically to stop it. The Federal Acquisition Regulation exists because of what happens when the line between public works and personal patronage disappears.

A president who controls contract awards without competitive process controls more than policy — he controls who gets paid. That is not a norm violation. It is a structural capture of the appropriations power the Constitution vests in Congress.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin Thursday pressing the department to coordinate AI cybersecurity defenses with state, local, tribal, and territorial governments — before, as he put it, "there are any major disruptions to hospitals or energy grids — or worse." The letter follows Anthropic's limited release of Mythos, a model capable of identifying decades-old security vulnerabilities that the company declined to release publicly.

Schumer's sharpest punch: CISA still has no Senate-confirmed director under the second Trump administration. He also flagged DHS's decision to suspend funding for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center — the primary cyber-sharing resource for sub-federal governments — mid-transition to an unspecified new model.

The play here is straightforward. Schumer gets credit for ringing the alarm while the administration owns every day the CISA director's chair stays empty. A hospital ransomware event lands differently when the paper trail shows Democrats asked and Republicans shrugged.

Via The Hill, Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Russell Fry (R-S.C.) introduced legislation Thursday to pull the Secret Service out of DHS and place it inside the Executive Office of the President. The package also includes bills to make FEMA a Cabinet-level agency and move TSA to the Transportation Department.

Said Moskowitz: "DHS has simply grown too big and too vulnerable to political dysfunction. Secret Service needs help and under the current DHS bureaucracy, that reform is never going to happen."

The strategic read: moving the Secret Service directly under the president resolves a genuine protection-chain problem — but it also eliminates the one layer of institutional distance between the protective detail and direct White House command. Who controls the agents who protect the president matters enormously when the president is also the primary threat to constitutional order. Congress should be clear-eyed about what "direct accountability to the president" actually means in this administration.

Senator Alan Armstrong (R-OK) — former CEO of pipeline giant Williams — argued in The Hill that the United States' energy cost crisis is self-inflicted, rooted in a domestic permitting regime that blocks construction long after other approvals are in place. The receipts are specific: Pennsylvania natural gas sells near $2.75 per unit nationally, but 120 miles away in Massachusetts consumers pay $9.70 — 252 percent above average. California, isolated from interstate crude networks, imports more than 60 percent of its fuel from abroad and pays gasoline prices more than 30 percent above the national average.

Said Armstrong: "Energy abundance is meaningless if you can't move it to where it's needed."

This is the canonical American infrastructure trap — the same logic that left mid-19th-century grain rotting in prairie silos until railroad trunk lines caught up. The political economy is identical: abundance at the source, scarcity at the destination, and a legal environment that rewards delay over delivery. Armstrong's proposed fixes to Section 401 of the Clean Water Act deserve a serious hearing on their merits — and serious scrutiny of who actually benefits from the new litigation standards he proposes.

Congress faces its second consecutive appropriations war before a midterm election, according to The Hill, which reports that the 2026 cycle produced two government shutdowns before resolution — and that House GOP leaders are now immediately entering the fiscal 2027 fight, the last major legislative battle expected before November's elections.

This pattern has a long pedigree. The Constitutional framers placed appropriations power in Article I precisely because they understood it as the legislature's most consequential lever — and its most dangerous one when used as a factional weapon rather than a governing tool. Every prolonged shutdown era in modern history, from 1995–96 to 2013 to 2018–19, has extracted a political price from the party perceived as preferring dysfunction to governance.

Two shutdowns in a single appropriations cycle is not brinkmanship as strategy; it is evidence that the majority has lost the institutional capacity to govern. Voters in midterm elections have historically noticed.

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Thursday that the Trump administration's cancellation of more than $100 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants was unconstitutional — permanently barring the administration from terminating the funding, per NBC News.

Said Judge Colleen McMahon: "The public has a strong interest in ensuring that federal officials act within the bounds set by Congress and the Constitution."

The ruling lands on a question older than DOGE and older than Trump: whether a president can simply stop spending money Congress has already appropriated. The answer, across two and a half centuries of American constitutional practice, has always been no.

The Trump administration announced it will begin revoking passports for Americans who owe more than $2,500 in child support, moving toward stricter enforcement of a 1996 law signed by President Clinton that has largely sat dormant — with prior enforcement focused almost exclusively on blocking renewals, not pulling existing documents.

Said the State Department: "is using common sense tools to support American families and strengthen compliance with U.S. laws" — adding that revocation "supports the welfare of American children by exacting real consequences for child support delinquency under existing federal law." The department estimates the passport rule has generated $382 million in collections since inception and says it is tracking 4.3 million people with outstanding debt.

The play: low legal risk (Ninth Circuit upheld the statute in 2002, *Eunique v. Powell*), high optics return. This is an administration that dismantles enforcement mechanisms daily — deploying one selectively is branding, not governance. Who gets swept up, and how consistently, will be the tell.

A federal judge ruled this week that the Doge-directed elimination of more than $100 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants was unconstitutional, finding the cuts discriminatory, according to the Washington Post.

The ruling also surfaced details about how DOGE operated internally — its decision-making process now part of the public court record.

This is not primarily a story about the humanities. It is a story about which branch of government controls federal spending — a question the Constitution settled in 1787 and that every administration eventually has to relearn the hard way.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled Thursday that DOGE's mass termination of National Endowment for the Humanities grants was, in her words, 'in violation of the First Amendment, in violation of the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment, and without statutory authority.' The 143-page opinion covers grants previously approved and appropriated by Congress — grants DOGE canceled unilaterally in April 2025. Plaintiffs included the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and The Authors Guild.

The receipts McMahon surfaces are damning on their merits: DOGE staff 'did not examine any applications or underlying materials' and used ChatGPT to generate termination rationales. The staffers leading the effort, the judge noted, were in their 20s and 'did not have much experience in anything at all.'

The impoundment principle here is older than the republic's first contested budget fight. Article I, Section 9 exists precisely because the Framers watched a king spend Parliament's appropriations as he chose. A president's policy preferences do not override a congressional spending decision — that was true in 1789, and McMahon has now said so again.