These Are Not Serious People
The party of deficit-busting is about to blow a multi-trillion dollar hole in federal revenues—and paper it over with a budgetary gimmick.
The last twelve hours have seen major developments in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant wrongfully deported to prison in El Salvador earlier this year despite a judge’s order barring exactly that. Last night, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned, unopposed opinion ruling that the White House must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, saying a lower court’s order “properly requires the Government . . . to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
SCOTUS ordered the Maryland federal court to clarify its order compelling the administration to try to retrieve Abrego Garcia—which Judge Paula Xinis promptly did in a filing last night, ordering the government to “take all available steps” to facilitate the prisoner’s return “as soon as possible” and to report on his status by 9:30 this morning. The ball is now back in the White House’s court. Will they defy the order or merely play games with the language of it? We anxiously await. Happy Friday.
Fun with Numbers
by Andrew Egger
Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs and the barmy calculations the administration used to devise them aren’t the only deeply fishy math the Republican party is indulging this week.
As they stumble toward a budget bill, GOP lawmakers are also working to renew the tax cuts package from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. As originally passed, those cuts were temporary—a necessity to make the budgetary math add up at the time. But because current law plans for them to expire, renewing them would (per traditional accounting rules) blow a brand new hole in the federal budget, spiking deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This will all come at a time when Republicans are trying to posture as though they’re finally ready to get serious—no fooling this time—about the debt.
So how do Republicans hope to surmount this messaging hurdle? By lying, mostly.
The current budget framework, approved by the Senate last week and by the House on Wednesday, takes an approach to assessing its impact on the deficit you might charitably call novel. Rather than scoring the framework on a “current law” baseline—as in, recognizing that the tax cuts are legally set to expire and being honest about the cost of renewing them in the budget framework—Republicans are using a “current policy” baseline: assessing the budget framework in contrast with tax levels as they stand today.
Why make this change? Because it gives them permission to pretend that permanently renewing temporary tax cuts—which, again, had to be temporary to make the math work when they were originally passed—comes with a price tag of zero. It’s free real estate.
It’s hard to find an appropriate metaphor for how ridiculous this is, but Manhattan Institute economist Jessica Riedl took an admirable stab in the New York Times back in March. “Last year, despite being deeply in debt, I bought a $100,000 sports car. So next year, buying another $100,000 sports car is not irresponsible because I am merely spending the same amount of money as the year before,” she wrote. “And if I purchase ‘only’ a $70,000 car, then I should be congratulated for reducing my annual spending by $30,000.”
This is amazing stuff coming from a Republican-controlled Congress that just spent the last few years repeatedly taking the nation to the brink of government shutdown or debt default, supposedly over its deep concern about deficit spending. Of course, that was before Trump roared back into office demanding a fresh new stack of revenue-obliterating tax cuts, promising an end to taxes on everything from overtime to tips. Republicans are already kicking the can down the road on where to find spending cuts1 to solve for those changes; it’s far more convenient to pretend this other pile of cuts—which, again, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, will amount to trillions in lost revenue over the next decade—don’t require dealing with.
Supposed budget hardliners in the House folded en masse this week after Trump told them Tuesday night to “close your eyes and get there.” The sole exceptions were Reps. Victoria Spartz and Thomas Massie. Spartz—not exactly a typical voice of reason by reputation—hit the nail on the head here: “The instructions we voted on today,” she said, “are still setting us up for the largest deficit increase in the history of our Republic, & opening up a ‘pandora’s box’ by changing accounting rules to hide it.”
Massie was even more biting: “If you were trying to hasten financial collapse of our country and bribe voters to go along with it, the strategy wouldn’t look much different than what Congress is doing today. The big beautiful bill cuts taxes while keeping spending on an increasingly unsustainable trajectory.”
The shamelessness here would be astonishing if it wasn’t so typical. Elsewhere in Washington, Elon Musk and DOGE are leaving the federal bureaucracy a smoldering ruin, slashing and burning and tearing the wires out of the walls of the government. At a cabinet meeting yesterday, he proudly unveiled his total anticipated savings: $150 billion for fiscal year 2026. When I talk to Republican friends and family about DOGE, they point to these savings as a crucial step in finally getting a handle on our national debt—one well worth the destruction. But even if that number weren’t massively overinflated, which it absolutely, definitely is—all while being significantly smaller than the $2 trillion in savings Musk originally promised—its gains would be washed away many times over by the financial cost of this single congressional budgetary gimmick.
That Congress is trying it anyway speaks to their confidence that Republican voters don’t actually care about reining in the debt—or at least that they will be too distracted with other stuff going on to bother kicking the tires on their work. And, well, there is a lot else going on—a difficulty Riedl herself acknowledges. She told The Bulwark that “I would usually be lighting myself on fire outside the Capitol” over the current-policy gimmick “if we weren’t in the middle of tariffs right now.”
“There’s so much chaos going on right now that you just can’t hit all of it,” she added.
The Pause That Fails to Refresh
by William Kristol
More than a week after Trump’s tariffs announcement and just a couple of days after his partial retreat, we’re in bad shape.
The tariffs that remain are still high, and will prove both inflationary and recessionary here at home. And the 90-day pause in the original tariffs isn’t going to help much, if at all. As French president Emmanuel Macron pointed out, “this pause of 90 days is 90 days of uncertainty for our enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.”
I’m not used to a president of France having a better understanding of the preconditions for sound business investment and sustained economic growth than a president of the United States. But in the age of Trump, here we are.
I’m also not used to the president of the People’s Republic of China being able with a straight face to lecture the United States on the importance of an international rules-based order. But that’s what President Xi Jinping was doing today in Beijing. He told the visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez that China and the European Union should “jointly oppose unilateral acts of bullying,” and uphold “the global rules-based order.”
It’s a sign of the wreckage created by Trump’s overall foreign policy that Xi can claim to be upholding the rules-based order against the United States—and that our own allies don’t simply react with laughter and scorn. The Europeans had, in recent years, become far more skeptical of China. Trump’s policies are reversing that welcome development.
An all-out trade war with China, the insane tariffs, the only temporary pause in the insane tariffs, the character of the Trump administration’s decision-making—all of this has markets thoroughly and understandably spooked. Wednesday’s equities rally was short-lived, the slide in the dollar continues, and most worrisome perhaps, the flight from U.S. treasuries shows no signs of abating.
A friend who understands these matters better than I do said to me last night that we’ll be lucky to get out of this with just a normal recession, as opposed to a real international economic crisis. As Kyle Rodda, one of Australia’s leading financial market commentators, told Reuters: “There’s clearly an exodus from U.S. assets. A falling currency and bond market is never a good sign. This goes beyond pricing in a growth slowdown and trade uncertainty.”
There’s a technical term economists have for a moment like this: “Yikes!”
As for the politics of the moment: We forget now, but only two weeks ago, before the tariffs, Trump seemed to be riding stubbornly high. Democrats were in their usual disarray.
But a massive policy failure by the party in power can do wonders for getting the party out of power into some sort of array. All Democrats have to do now is to avoid overthinking everything and straightforwardly hammer Trump on the terrible situation he’s recklessly and unilaterally created. They need to keep on introducing legislation to take trade authority back from Trump and to reverse the tariffs. And they need to keep pointing out that their Republican colleagues in the Senate and House could staunch the bleeding if they simply joined them in these efforts.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” could prove an inflection point when some Republican elected officials, and some Republican voters, liberate themselves from Donald Trump. It’s unfortunate we’ll all have to pay a steep price for getting to that moment.
Needless to say, it would have been far better not to have elected him in the first place. But here we are.
AROUND THE BULWARK
SCOTUS Orders Trump Administration to “Facilitate” Return of Wrongly Deported Man… On Bulwark+ Takes, Politico’s KYLE CHENEY joins SAM STEIN to break down the Supreme Court upholding a lower court’s order that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador.
One Justice Department Office Is Key to Trump’s Authoritarian Plans… The Civil Rights Division used to be the “crown jewel” of the department. Not anymore, writes JONATHAN BLANKS.
After a Century, Two Soldiers Get True Rest… “Operation Benjamin” makes sure the graves of America’s fallen Jewish soldiers are properly marked. GEN. MARK HERTLING on a first-of-its-kind ceremony at Arlington.
He’s a Key Thinker of the Radical Right, But Is He All That? JOSHUA TAIT writes about where the rediscovery of Sam Francis has gone wrong.
Quick Hits
KEEP YOUR ENEMY CLOSE: Washington D.C.’s ultimate insider outlet, Politico, became one of the Trump administration’s first media targets in February after a bizarre coincidence—a missed payroll at the company that coincided with the shutdown of USAID—spawned a conspiracy theory that the shuttered foreign aid agency was secretly funding the publication.
The hoax created a real problem for Politico, with the White House ordering federal agencies to cancel millions of dollars worth of subscriptions to its policy-focused premium news product, Politico Pro. Trump even made noise about somehow clawing the money back. Now Politico’s owner, the German media conglomerate Axel Springer, appears to have a plan for avoiding the hot seat again: hiring some Beltway influence through a Trump-tied lobbying firm. According to a disclosure filed Thursday, Axel has hired Ballard Partners to lobby for them in Washington.
Ballard’s alumni list includes Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Those are precisely the kind of people whose phone numbers Axel, which also owns Business Insider and Morning Brew, might want the next time it ends up on the wrong side of a TruthSocial post.
Axel didn’t respond to a request for comment.
—Will Sommer
ONE WEIRD TRICK TO SOLVE YOUR MOLD PROBLEM: Last month, we told you about the gross conditions facing Department of Agriculture (USDA) workers reporting back to the aging South Building in Washington, D.C. after years of working primarily from home. Employees shared pictures of moldy offices, roaches loitering in bathrooms, and “asbestos project” notices pasted in common areas. But we also noted that some employees had been skittish about making a stink, “reasoning that the new administration’s ‘solution’ to such a problem would simply be to place the building up for sale and lay them all off.”
Well, uh, here’s Government Executive reporting this week on USDA plans to “dismantle its presence in Washington D.C.” and “relocate those it does not lay off to three hubs around the country.” They go on:
The locations for those new offices have not yet been determined, senior officials throughout the department have told employees in recent days, but the shakeup will impact thousands of headquarters staff. USDA is expected to offload one of its two Washington headquarters buildings, according to two employees familiar with the matter.
Government Executive didn’t specify which of the two USDA buildings was on the chopping block, but general employee consensus is that the South Building is the more derelict fossil.
The news comes as USDA employees are coming off a second round of “fork in the road” opportunities for deferred resignation, with Elon Musk’s DOGE seemingly reasoning that a few months of hell under the new administration may have compelled more people to run for the hills. That reasoning doesn’t appear far off: One worker who’d been suffering through the conditions at the South Building told The Bulwark that he and the bulk of his team were taking the offer, calling it “preferable to being laid off . . . or relocated outside the DC region.”
WE’RE GOING TO GET IT: The New York Times has noticed (and gotten some great reporting illustrating) that Trump is absolutely, 100 percent not kidding about acquiring Greenland:
President Trump’s longtime goal of claiming Greenland for America has shifted from rhetoric to official U.S. policy as the White House moves forward on a formal plan to acquire the Arctic island from Denmark.
The plan mobilizes several cabinet departments behind Mr. Trump’s years of talk about wanting Greenland, whose economic and strategic value has grown as warming temperatures melt Arctic ice.
While Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out seizing Greenland by force, the plan under construction hinges instead on a buffoonish campaign to pay Greenlanders into voting themselves out of Denmark and into the United States:
The Trump administration is also studying financial incentives for Greenlanders, including the possibility of replacing the $600 million in subsidies that Denmark gives the island with an annual payment of about $10,000 per Greenlander.
Some Trump officials believe those costs could be offset by new revenue from the extraction of Greenland’s natural resources, which include rare earth minerals, copper, gold, uranium and oil.
It’s shaping up to be a classic Trump story—so dumb it’s hard to believe it isn’t some sort of bit, and yet, here we are.
Cheap Shots
Each day a little more ... and in so many ways ...
I miss Joe.
Having lived in and reported on China for four years I feel I have some standing to say this tariff battle is picking an unwinnable war. Another example of being unserious. All bluster. No thought or strategy.