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4 winners and 4 losers from the funding bill and emergency declaration

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Trump’s national emergency declaration starts a new fight — but it also resolves the spending battle of the past few months.
The long-term effects of President Donald Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency Friday — unlocking an additional $7.5 billion to build physical barriers (a “wall”) on the US-Mexico border, in addition to the $1.375 billion appropriated by Congress in the bill Trump signed to fund the government through September 30 — won’t be fully known or understood until the historians get to them.
The emergency declaration itself could be held up in court for months or years. The construction of barriers it authorizes, if allowed to go forward, could take years more. The influence it has (or lack thereof) on norms of executive authority, and the precedent it may or may not set for future political actions, will be the subject of endless debate.
But what happened Friday morning wasn’t just the start of some new and uneasy moment. It was the culmination of a months-long funding battle that resulted in the longest (partial) government shutdown in history. Trump just signed a bill that sets funding levels (and keeps the government open) for the next six months, in addition to making some policy changes around the edges. And the emergency declaration alters political dynamics in Washington that are going to have an impact on what change various politicians can make in the future.
The “winners” and “losers” here are the real effects on people’s lives; even the rising or falling stock of a given politician matters for the policy and institutional agendas he seeks to advance. Even if Trump’s declaration of national emergency opens a whole set of new fights, there are people whose fortunes are definitely better or worse after this morning.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s uncanny ability to make it all about him, the national emergency declaration is getting most of the attention right now. But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Congress just passed (and the president just signed) a bill to fund nine Cabinet departments and a host of federal agencies through the end of the fiscal year on September 30. And unlike the emergency declaration — which even the Department of Justice anticipates will almost certainly be slowed by the courts — the funding bill is actually going into effect.
In other words, the United States has just ensured that we won’t have another government shutdown for at least six and a half months.
That might not seem like much of a respite. But it’s the longest respite the federal government — and federal employees — have had since Trump came into office.
It’s not just that there have been three shutdowns over the past two years (though two of them happened over weekends and thus barely affected federal employees), or that the shutdown that ended three weeks ago was the longest in history. It’s that when the government has been open, it’s often been running on short-term continuing resolutions. Over Trump’s time in office, a normal budgeting process would have had the government face two funding deadlines, when the fiscal years ended for 2017 and 2018; instead, it’s faced 12. And many of those have gone down to the wire.
Many federal employees will be dealing with the financial aftermath of January’s shutdown (and their delayed paychecks) for some time. But the uncertainty of governance-by-continuing-resolution has its own costs to federal employees’ budgets and psyches. Six and a half months is, relatively speaking, a high degree of certainty.
Furthermore, it’s possible that Trump’s breaking the seal on the national emergency might reduce the risk of future government funding brinksmanship. The president has been threatening to shut down the government over the wall since spring 2017; he finally did it, it didn’t work, and now he’s trying something else. It’s possible that if he no longer sees threatening shutdown as the best way to get what he wants, the next two years might give federal employees more than a few weeks at a time before they have to worry about when they’re getting their next paycheck.
And the cherry on top: Defying Trump’s effort to freeze federal salaries, Congress authorized a 1.8 percent pay raise in the funding bill for civilian feds.
It’s a staple of fifth-grade civics units: The federal government is made of three co-equal branches kept in equilibrium by a system of “checks and balances,” and one of the most important checks that the legislative branch has on the executive — arguably Congress’s most important power, period — is the “power of the purse.”
Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, and Congress determines how that money gets spent. The executive branch might be legally obligated to submit a budget, but the legislative branch has no legal obligation to pay attention to it.
In practice, the executive branch has some options when it wants to move money around. And Congress has passed laws that give the executive branch even more powers in the case of a national emergency — though an emergency declaration unlocks a long list of specific powers, not a blank check to do whatever the president wants.
But even if Trump’s national emergency declaration is a valid exercise of the National Emergencies Act of 1976 — and it will be up to the courts to figure that out — the fact remains: The president of the United States demanded that Congress fund a policy priority of his, Congress refused to fund it at the levels demanded, and the president responded by directing billions more dollars to it anyway.
What really distinguishes this emergency declaration from others isn’t necessarily the factual question of what counts as a national emergency. It’s the fact that Trump telegraphed what he was going to do for weeks — while Congress was negotiating with him and with itself over government funding. Trump was absent from the negotiations that produced this funding bill. He’d already made it clear that if he didn’t get what he wanted from Congress, he’d simply get it another way.
Of course, Trump’s obviousness is going to make it that much harder for the Department of Justice to defend the emergency declaration from the inevitable lawsuits. But that’s the story of the federal government over the past decade or so: The executive branch makes policy, and the judicial branch decides whether to uphold it. The legislative branch is left giving vaguely disapproving quotes to the press.

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