#us-appropriations

#us-appropriations

"My constituents are saving thousands of dollars and they know it. Republicans can and should take credit because the alternative would've been massive tax hikes under the Democrats had they won the 2024 election."

The law did not eliminate the charitable deduction in name. It rendered it functionally useless for anyone who does not already have enough deductions to clear the standard deduction threshold on their own.

"We're having to cut off projects that we really want to do," said Cox, who lives with his wife in Charleston, South Carolina.

The economics are hard to ignore. Shooting down a drone with AeroVironment's LOCUST laser system costs less than $10, using just two to five seconds of laser energy. Compare that to the interceptor missiles currently used against Iranian drone swarms, which cost orders of magnitude more and are in short supply across allied arsenals.

The so-called pork-barrel grants are not awarded on a competitive or transparent basis, and most get disbursed outside the normal budget process, meaning state lawmakers never vote on the individual recipients.

The White House is seeking a 10 percent cut to nondefense spending, proposing a reduction of $73 billion from federal programs outside the military, targeting environmental initiatives.

As the Federal student aid portfolio soars to nearly $1.7 trillion and with nearly a quarter of student loan borrowers in default, Americans know that the Department of Education has failed to effectively manage and deliver these critical programs. By leveraging Treasury's world-renowned expertise in finance and economic policy, we are confident that American students, borrowers, and taxpayers will finally have functioning programs after decades of mismanagement.

The interchamber tensions between Democrats are becoming a regular feature of funding fights in the second Trump term. Lawmakers, strategists and voters alike exploded in anger last March when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a handful of colleagues allowed a spending package to move forward amid the Elon Musk-led DOGE assault on federal agencies. In November, tempers again flared when a handful of Senate Democrats joined with Republicans to end a record 43-day shutdown.

These new restrictions-which can be found throughout the appropriations bill for the Department of Education and other sections of the 11-part funding package that was signed into law last week-are part of what policy experts describe as a bipartisan attempt to rebuke the Trump administration's budget proposal and restore Congress's power of the purse. Historically, the language of these budget bills has largely stayed the same, serving as little more than a template into which lawmakers plug that year's dollar amounts and policy riders.