Senators will forfeit their paychecks during future government shutdowns under a new measure set to take effect after the midterm elections, according to Bloomberg Politics. The provision adds a direct financial consequence for lawmakers who fail to pass funding legislation before a lapse occurs.

The Senate unanimously adopted a resolution directing the secretary of the Senate to withhold senators' pay during any lapse in federal agency appropriations, with payments released once a shutdown ends, according to CBS News. Said sponsor Sen. John Kennedy: "Shutting down government — it should not be our default solution to our refusal to work out our issues and our differences." The resolution, which passed 99-0 earlier this week, takes effect after November's election under the 27th Amendment's restrictions on mid-term pay changes.

Multiple Republican senators are warning that a Trump administration request for tens of billions of dollars to fund the Iran war faces significant resistance in the upper chamber, according to The Hill. Said one unnamed GOP senator, as characterized by the outlet: patience is waning over what members describe as the absence of a clear plan to end the conflict.

Thousands of federal employees remain in administrative limbo after Trump's January executive order titled "Workforce Optimization Initiative" triggered widespread reductions in force across multiple agencies, according to The Dispatch. The order, signed less than two weeks after Trump's second inauguration, was designed to reduce federal spending, but the layoff process has left affected workers without clear resolution.

Senate Republicans voted down more than a dozen Democratic resolutions aimed at reinstating Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations rolled back under the Trump administration, according to The Hill. The measures targeted CFPB policies on overdraft fees, credit report privacy, and mortgage lending.

Democratic lawmakers remained skeptical of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's testimony that U.S. military weapons stockpiles are adequate amid active operations against Iran, according to The Hill. Congressional doubts center on two unresolved questions from Hegseth's appearance before House and Senate appropriators: whether stockpiles are dangerously depleted and how much firepower Iran retains.

The Trump administration announced it will withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California, citing the state's alleged failure to combat fraud in the program, according to the New York Times. Said Vice President JD Vance: the state "had not done enough to fight fraud" in the public health insurance program.

The Trump administration withheld $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California and warned all 50 states that federal funding to their Medicaid Fraud Control Units could be frozen if they fail to aggressively prosecute fraud, according to NBC News. Said CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz: "It's the largest deferral we've ever made. We're making it for a good reason. We'd like the state to at least come to the table and explain to us how these outlier payments have been generated."

The Senate unanimously voted to advance a resolution that would suspend senators' salaries during any future government shutdown, according to The Hill. The measure was sponsored by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and applies only to members of the Senate.

The Department of Health and Human Services placed an immediate six-month moratorium on new Medicare enrollments for home health care and hospice providers, citing fraud prevention, according to The Hill. The freeze bars new providers in both categories from signing up for Medicare reimbursement during the moratorium period.

A discharge petition to bring $1.3 billion in Ukraine aid to the House floor reached 218 signatures, according to The New York Times. Representative Kevin Kiley, independent of California, provided the deciding 218th signature; a floor vote could occur as soon as the end of May.

A contributor argues Congress should authorize a temporary household gasoline subsidy to offset fuel-price pressure during the Iran conflict, according to The Hill. The proposal frames the rebate as a signal that policymakers are willing to act on affordability, not only on security.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee on the Trump administration's fiscal 2027 budget request, which proposes cutting the agency's funding by 52 percent to $4.2 billion in budget authority, according to The Hill. The request represents the steepest proposed reduction to EPA funding in the agency's history.

FBI Director Kash Patel and Sen. Chris Van Hollen traded sharp words at a Senate budget hearing after Van Hollen questioned Patel about media reports of excessive drinking, according to NBC News. The source article does not include verbatim quotes from the exchange, but NBC News describes the confrontation as heated.

Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) endorsed President Trump's proposed federal gas tax holiday, describing the 18-cent-per-gallon cut as "symbolic" but still meaningful for consumers, according to Bloomberg Politics. Atlantic Council Vice President Josh Lipsky said Iran is unlikely to appear on the agenda when Trump meets President Xi in Beijing, arguing Trump wants "deliverables" from the summit rather than a broader diplomatic conversation.

House Democrats are introducing legislation to redirect oil company profits toward fuel cost relief rather than suspending the federal gas tax, according to Axios. Said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who is set to introduce one such bill: it would impose a 100% windfall tax on oil company profits derived from selling crude above $75 per barrel.

The Secret Service presented Congress with a detailed justification for a proposed $1 billion funding increase as Republicans pressed for specifics and Democrats moved to the offensive, according to The New York Times. The agency's pitch came amid unease among GOP members over a proposed presidential ballroom expenditure included in the broader request.

Nearly two-thirds of nonprofits surveyed in February reported concerns about their organization's financial stability amid federal funding cuts, according to Axios. Said the Center for Effective Philanthropy's survey data: 39 percent of respondents reported spending more than they are taking in, as demand for services rises alongside inflation and reductions to programs including SNAP.

Bristol Myers Squibb announced a partnership with Chinese drugmaker Hengrui Pharma covering more than a dozen early-stage programs, according to STAT News. The deal is among the largest examples of a global pharmaceutical company turning to China to restock its early-stage pipeline, STAT reported.

Senior House Appropriations Republicans expressed skepticism toward the Pentagon's $1.5 billion budget request, with defense subcommittee chair Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) pressing Pentagon officials while Congress awaits a separate supplemental spending request tied to the war in Iran, according to The Hill.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chair Dan Caine appeared before the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee to answer questions on the fiscal year 2027 Pentagon budget request and the ongoing conflict with Iran, according to The Hill. Hegseth also faced questions related to his reported friction with Sen. Mark Kelly (R-Ariz.), a member of the panel.

Federal prosecutors indicted Synergy Marine and technical superintendent Radhakrishnan Karthik Nair on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, failing to notify the Coast Guard of a hazardous condition, false statements, and obstruction, according to CBS News. The indictment alleges Synergy improperly used a maintenance "flushing pump" to supply diesel to two of the MV Dali's generators for months before the March 2024 crash that killed six construction workers; an NTSB report had previously called that use "inappropriate."

Members of Congress with Pentagon budget oversight questioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the growing costs of the ongoing Iran war, according to Bloomberg Politics. President Trump separately suggested a fragile ceasefire with Tehran may not hold.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before both chambers for Pentagon budget hearings, according to The Hill. Trump's decision to withdraw 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany has not persuaded European allies to join the U.S. military effort in Iran or assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine testified Tuesday before House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees on a $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2027 Pentagon budget request, according to CBS News. The proposal would represent a 42% increase over 2026 spending levels. Said Sen. Mark Kelly: "When I got to the Senate five and a half years ago, the defense budget was just over $700 billion. Now they're asking for twice as much money — it's nearly the amount that the rest of the world pays for its defense."

Advocacy organizations representing people with sickle cell disease and HIV are lobbying federal officials for automatic exemptions from Medicaid work requirements included in President Trump's tax cut legislation, according to STAT News. Federal officials face a June 1 deadline to issue implementation guidance to states, which must then build compliance systems by January 1.

Under current policies, publicly held federal debt is on track to exceed 240 percent of GDP over the next three decades, adding roughly $200 trillion in new borrowing on top of the existing $31 trillion already outstanding, according to The Dispatch. The Congressional Budget Office, comparing a debt-stabilization path against current policy, found the higher-debt trajectory would cut total per-capita output by 27 percent; separately, IMF cross-national research links debt above 85 percent of GDP to slower growth, a threshold the U.S. already exceeds when state and local obligations are included.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune plans to defend the $1 billion White House ballroom appropriations request as a security expenditure rather than a construction project, according to Axios. Said Thune: "It's a security-related measure. You've got a president where there have been three assassination attempts in just the last two years."

President Trump nominated Kari Lake as U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica, according to The New York Times. Lake previously led the effort to dismiss hundreds of Voice of America journalists and eliminate federal funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — both congressionally appropriated broadcast entities — but the campaign ultimately failed.

President Trump has nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead FEMA for a second time, months after the administration removed him from the role, according to NPR Politics. Hamilton was dismissed in 2025 after telling Congress that FEMA should continue to exist.

President Trump selected Cameron Hamilton to return as FEMA director, according to Bloomberg Politics. The agency is entering Atlantic hurricane season with reduced staffing levels.

A bipartisan group of senators urged President Trump to move forward with a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan and signal to Chinese leader Xi Jinping at this week's Beijing summit that U.S. support for the island is non-negotiable, according to Bloomberg Politics.

Senate Republicans returned from recess to advance a $72 billion DHS funding package that includes $1 billion in Secret Service funds tied to Trump's 90,000-square-foot East Wing renovation, according to CBS News. Said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: "At a time when Americans can't make ends meet, Republicans say 'Let them eat cake' — and then hand Trump a billion dollars to build a ballroom to serve it in."

Operation Epic Fury consumed more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles in a matter of weeks, while current production runs only 90 to 100 units per year, meaning full replenishment would take roughly a decade, according to The Dispatch. Said AEI's Hal Brands: "get ready for 'missile famine' if there is a great-power war" — a warning the Iran operations appear to have validated, with the Pentagon also firing 150 THAAD interceptors in the 12-Day War against a backdrop of fewer than three dozen produced annually.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he wants to end American financial support for Israel's military over the next ten years, according to Bloomberg Politics. The remarks came in an interview with CBS News.

President Trump directed all federal agencies to purchase American-made goods, framing decades of federal procurement as a giveaway to foreign countries at taxpayer expense, according to The Hill. Said Trump: "ALL FEDERAL AGENCIES MUST BUY AMERICAN — NO EXCUSES."

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) called the Trump administration's fiscal year 2027 defense budget request "outrageous," according to CBS News. The proposal represents a 42% increase over 2026 levels. Said Kelly on "Face the Nation": "When I got to the Senate five and a half years ago, the defense budget was just over $700 billion. Now they're asking for twice as much money — it's nearly the amount that the rest of the world pays for its defense."

Energy Secretary Chris Wright floated a pause in the federal gasoline tax, which currently stands at 18.4 cents per gallon, according to The New York Times. The federal gas tax funds the Highway Trust Fund, the primary source of federal highway and transit spending, and any suspension would require congressional action under Article I appropriations authority.

State-run Affordable Care Act marketplaces are reporting declining enrollment as the enhanced subsidies ended by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act phase out, with experts and state officials warning the drop will accelerate through 2026 and beyond, according to The Hill. The impact varies by state, but the overall direction is consistent across markets.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth endorsed a bipartisan bill that would expand benefits for roughly 54,000 combat-injured veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, according to The Hill. The bill faces opposition from key Senate Republicans, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, over cost concerns.

The shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development has notified Congress that it holds $19 billion in funds designated to cover costs associated with closing out the programs it terminated, according to The Hill. Critics are pressing the administration to redirect those appropriated dollars toward ongoing humanitarian needs rather than administrative wind-down expenses.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the 76-day federal funding lapse left his department's World Cup security preparation "not as proactive" as it should have been, according to The Hill. Said Mullin at a DHS press conference in Kansas City: "The department can..." — the remarks came alongside Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) as the 2026 tournament approaches.

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.

A federal judge rebuked the Department of Government Efficiency for using artificial intelligence tools to identify and execute roughly $100 million in cuts to federal humanities funding, Bloomberg Politics reported May 7. The ruling plants a judicial flag directly on DOGE's methodology, not just its outcomes.

The core problem: Congress appropriated that money. An AI model scanning for savings doesn't override the Appropriations Clause. The judge's critique isn't about whether humanities programs deserve funding — it's about who gets to decide the money doesn't flow.

The strategic read: this is exactly the litigation path opponents needed. Every DOGE cut routed through an algorithm rather than a reprogramming request to Congress is now a potential reversal target. The AI-as-auditor model just got a receipts problem of its own.

Kevin Warsh arrives at the Federal Reserve on May 15 wanting to shrink a $6.7 trillion balance sheet he told the Senate Banking Committee has 'done quite a bit of harm' to the institution's credibility, per The Dispatch. The last time a Fed chair arrived with ideological clarity about restraint and a mandate to pull back, the plumbing fought back — and won.

The numbers say why. The Fed's own reserve-management experience from late 2024 is the receipt: by October, bank reserves fell thin enough that banks borrowed record amounts at the Fed's overnight backstop on Halloween and New Year's Eve. The Fed stopped shrinking in December, then began buying short-term Treasury bills — branded 'Reserve Management Purchases' — weeks later.

This pattern goes back to every post-crisis consolidation attempt since the Fed's modern balance-sheet era began in 2008: the institution discovers a floor below which contraction becomes systemic risk, not discipline. Warsh will find that floor again. The question is whether he finds it before or after the pipes crack.

A new Trust for America's Health report, released Thursday, finds that only 20 states scored 'high' on national public health emergency preparedness — meaning 30 states and the District of Columbia are either middling or outright unprepared as the United States prepares to host the 2026 World Cup and its millions of international visitors.

Seventeen states and D.C. landed in the 'middle tier'; 13 states fell below even that threshold, per the TFAH annual scoring.

The historian's note: the United States has run this same experiment before. After the 1918 influenza pandemic exposed catastrophic gaps in state-level public health infrastructure, Congress built the Public Health Service into something functional — then spent the following century episodically defunding it between crises. The 2025 federal appropriations cuts to CDC and public health grants are the latest iteration of that cycle. Thirty states being unprepared is not a surprise; it is the predictable output of a funding structure that treats public health as discretionary spending.

DHS has begun winding down its internal detention oversight office, blaming a funding lapse, NPR Politics reported May 7. The office's mandate included investigating detainee deaths and monitoring access to medical care — precisely the functions that grow more consequential as detention populations expand.

NPR notes that detention deaths and average lengths of stay have both increased even as the office is being shuttered. No replacement mechanism was identified in the report.

The mechanism here is an old one: starve the inspector, then point to the vacancy as proof oversight wasn't working. Congress has used appropriations riders to kill inconvenient watchdogs since at least the Church Committee era — but the reversal usually required a floor vote and a named sponsor. Doing it through a quiet lapse, with deaths rising in the very facilities being de-supervised, removes even that accountability threshold.

The latest GOP immigration package contains $1 billion for Trump's East Wing renovation project. Republicans on the Hill are openly worried this turns the bill into an internal-party fight rather than a border-policy win. This is what Article I looks like when Congress treats the appropriations power as a personal favor budget instead of a constitutional duty.