I should be clear: the president is always briefed on the data beforehand. What never happens is showing the data early. Huge market-moving problems with this, and you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle for Trump.

absolute masterpiece

If we keep getting more and more and more for the same cost, that means we get wage gains and price decreases for things that are not labor-intensive. There's that viral graph that shows goods getting cheaper and services getting more expensive.

Productivity keeps going up!

Productivity gains lead to lower goods prices plus strong dollar!

therefore also an immediate cut relative to the previous year’s funding level.

Here were all the accounts he did it to. In total, this was a legal way to cut $2.934 billion (contrasted with all the illegal impoundments he did).

(The better way to do it, btw, is to just get rid of the need for the president to agree it's an emergency.)

Anyway, in this case it was “emergency” funding, so when Trump rejected the emergency designation, it works out to be an immediate cut in funding relative to the CR we’d been running on, and

Imagine you had a budget cap of $700 bn. You provide $700 bn normal money plus $15 bn emergency money. If the president says "I don't count it as an emergency," then you've actually provided $715 bn of regular funding, and now you're over the cap. So the money disappears instead to avoid that.

Why does it just disappear? It's to prevent an accidental budget cap violations. When you have emergency money, it gets around budget caps (well, really, budget caps get raised an equal amount).

Under the law, first Congress designates something as an emergency, and then the president signs it into law, and then the president has to agree it’s an emergency.

If the president doesn’t agree it’s an emergency, that funding disappears.

Basically, we had an agreement to designate some normal spending as an “emergency” so that Republicans could pretend to their base spending was lower than it was but Dems could still get the money. That sort of bullshit accounting was a Kevin McCarthy special, and is part of why he lost his job.

This happened because he refused to designate a specific budget account as an emergency, causing a pot of extra money for it to disappear.

Because of how far into the year we were, it worked out to be an immediate 16% cut to the ongoing operations of the budget account.

Cannoli got to it first 🥹