The Trump Admin’s Very Telling Decisions About Which Government Programs to Fund

This is your TPM evening briefing.

and

Oct 16, 2025

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 30: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

In the hours immediately after the government first shut down earlier this month — which happened only after Republicans refused to work with Democrats to extend Obamacare subsidies in order to secure their votes to keep it open — the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress began publicly hand-ringing about the funding that would quickly run out for active duty military pay and for funding WIC, a federal supplemental nutrition program for low income mothers.

House Republicans held multiple press conferences spinning the blame for the shutdown onto Democrats who, they contended, did not care about American troops and moms who rely on federal social safety net programs. At the time, I noted the irony in their pearl clutching about mothers who rely on WIC to feed their children: just months before, in their original budget blueprints for what would become the “big, beautiful bill,” House Republicans proposed sweeping cuts to WIC that, if enacted, would’ve resulted in $1.3 billion in nutritional benefits being taken from some 5.2 million women and children.

And the version of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that he signed into law this summer included sweeping cuts to Medicaid that are expected to force some three million Americans off of WIC, according to the National WIC Association.

Obviously, the hypocrisy is nothing new. But flash forward a few weeks into the shutdown and the Trump administration has found ways to fund both.

Over the weekend, the Pentagon began making moves to use what it said were unspent funds for research and development to pay the checks for 1.3 million active duty troops. The White House apparently privately informed lawmakers that it would spend $6.5 billion from “leftover military R&D funding that’s available into next fall, according to a person familiar with the plan who was granted anonymity to speak about the details,” in Politico’s words.

And last week, the Trump administration announced that it would use supposed revenues from Trump’s tariffs to keep WIC running during the shutdown. Administration officials told congressional staffers that it planned to funnel $300 million into WIC to keep it functioning, the AP reported.

The legality of all of this is unclear. While Senate Democrats did block a procedural vote to take up a Department of Defense appropriations bill on Thursday (more on that below) — for the same reasons they haven’t given Senate Republicans the votes they need to pass a short-term spending bill to reopen the government; none of their requests are being considered — Democrats in the House have been looking for ways to fund WIC while the shutdown continues.

On Tuesday, Reps. Robert Scott (D-VA) and Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) introduced the WIC Benefits Protection Act, which would keep WIC fully funded during any current or future shutdowns by categorizing it as a mandatory program. It won’t get a vote anytime soon, however, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has kept the House out of session for weeks.

The Trump administration is stepping into legal gray areas, finding ways to move money around to keep the things it wants to keep operating operating — whether that is to score rhetorical points against Democrats or to keep their policy agenda creeping forward. Case in point: new reporting from the HuffPost today suggests that the Trump administration intends to continue paying law enforcement officers within the Department of Homeland Security throughout the shutdown, per a memo obtained by HuffPost. Those officers include ICE agents who have been conducting the brutal and inhumane raids in cities across the nation for months now.

Per HuffPost:

The memo issued by the agency’s top human resources officer on Wednesday said the White House had directed DHS to continue “timely payment” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officers, U.S. Border Patrol agents and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, even though federal funding had lapsed.
…
It did not spell out exactly where the money would be coming from or what the legal justification would be — only that DHS would “allocate available funding to ensure full and timely payments … for the duration of the shutdown.”

— Nicole LaFond

GOP Tries to Bait Dems

Senate Democrats blocked a procedural vote for the Senate to take up the Department of Defense appropriations bill on Thursday. It comes on day 16 of the ongoing government shutdown as Republicans continue to refuse to negotiate with the Democrats or even entertain their requests to extend the ACA subsidies in exchange for their votes.

Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) broke from their caucus to support the defense bill. Cortez-Masto and Fetterman have been doing that all month as they support the GOP CR. Shaheen on the other hand has been following Schumer’s lead.

“We can, and should, try to move forward on a bipartisan appropriations process even as we work to prevent tens of millions of Americans from seeing a massive spike in their health insurance premiums in the coming days,” Shaheen said in a statement following the vote. “More than anything else, what I hear from my constituents is a desire for us to work together in Washington to get things done. My vote today is a reflection of my commitment to do just that.”

Many other members of the Democratic caucus, however, signaled before the vote that they weren’t planning to go along with the GOP’s gambit to try to force them on record on a defense bill without any assurances that their priorities would be taken seriously.

— Emine Yücel

Trump Makes a Show of Action on IVF

It is still not clear how exactly the Trump administration plans to lower the cost of the infertility treatment, IVF, but the White House announced plans today that involve getting EMD Serono, a fertility treatment manufacturer, to reduce the cost of a medication that is used in IVF. He also announced that he would try to force employers to help cover the cost of IVF treatment. Per the Washington Post:

The Trump administration will soon issue guidance encouraging employersto offer fertility benefits directly to their employees, the president said, much as they offer dental or vision benefits. But the government will not offer subsidies to employers or require that they offer the coverage.

This is all good if it actually results in meaningful monetary relief for Americans who use the common fertility treatment. But it hardly measures up to Trump’s campaign promise to have the federal government pay for IVF for Americans.

It is unclear how these actions will impact Trump’s base of supporters, a chunk of whom believe in the types of extreme fetal personhood ideology that has put the fertility treatment in harms way over the years.

Trump just learned what IVF was mere months ago, after all.

— Nicole LaFond

John Bolton Indicted

NEW this evening, per CNN:

He now faces 18 charges: eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of retention of national defense information.
Prosecutors wrote in the indictment that during the time he was national security adviser to Trump, Bolton shared “more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities” with two unauthorized individuals. Both of those people were related to Bolton and didn’t have the authority to access classified information, prosecutors said.