budget Archives - Doctor Paradox

budget

September 11, 2025

The GOP budget bill takes the US further into debt for no good reason

In fact, not only are we going further into debt for no good reason, but we’re going further into debt for a bad one — actually, two very bad ones.

The same fiscal hawks that yelled histrionically about refusing to take on debt — even in times of crisis — let the GOP budget bill for FY2026 sail through without a peep despite it adding a debt burden of almost $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

And for what? The first terrible reason is so that a gaggle of wealthy donors can get even wealthier, have more lavish weddings, build ever more elaborate doomsday bunkers, recreate company towns from The Jungle, cavalierly flit off to space, and so on. Never could I have imagined Gilded Age 2.0 would be so dumb.

After screaming bloody murder for literal decades and lecturing Democrats about reckless spending and balanced budgets, the Republicans simply let this gigantic albatross sail right through without so much as a debate. It’s as if the national debt were suddenly the Epstein files — something you should weirdly be ashamed of still caring about after being whipped into a frenzy about it for years (including being cajoled to the Capitol to break the law on behalf of someone who is above the law).

“Reckless spending” is fine when my team does it, seems to be GOP orthodoxy. Future generations be damned — we only think about them under Democratic Presidents. Suddenly, it has become desirable to saddle the nation with more debt for no good reason.

Establishment of a police state

The second terrible rationale for taking the US further into debt is to create a police state in America, with literal concentration camps. Despite campaigning on deporting the alleged set of violent criminals within the undocumented immigrant demographic, Trump and his slavering goon squad have been picking up fathers, landscapers, students who posted things they don’t like on social media, random South Koreans, and anyone Tom Homan thinks looks a little bit too brown. In other words, the government is spending billions and billions of your tax dollars to get rid of hardworking taxpayers — a hateful Dunning-Kruger approach that is toxic both politically and economically.

This GOP tax and spending bill will also empower the federal government to take over Democratic cities — despite the fact that red states have more crime. And to deploy America’s federal law enforcement staff away from national and international crimes like sex trafficking and fraud, and turning them towards’ providing photo ops in DC. Because appearances are all that matter to this particular president and his regime.

All this to create the kind of police state with standing army that the Founders would have laughed out of the room — because they had just fought a bloody war to defeat that kind of autocratic nonsense. With its cash infusion of an eye-popping $171 billion across federal agencies and other new border security and detention facility funding, ICE is poised to become the 4th largest branch of the military — but deployed on home soil, increasingly against Americans.

The GOP Budget Bill in 7 Minutes

Ask the Bill: An HR1 NotebookLM

But you don’t have to take my word for it — here you can talk directly to the bill in natural language, in NotebookLM:

the HR1 GOP tax and spending budget bill for fiscal year 2026, in an interactive NotebookLM

GOP budget bill winners

See a full table of the winners and the new lay of the land and the immense growth of the administrative state that the GOP claims it is trying to eradicate:

July 9, 2025

What’s in the massive Republican spending bill?

US Republican Senators cavorting with military personnel, drinking and laughing and celebrating the orgy of money they are rolling in

The GOP just passed their budget reconciliation bill for FY2026 — a squeaker, but over the line and now signed into law. Looking at this staggering compilation of budget line items, we’re witnessing what can only be described as the construction of an unprecedented domestic security apparatus that should alarm anyone who values civil liberties and fiscal responsibility. What’s in the Republican spending bill? A massive financial allocation to create a new branch of the military — essentially a militarized standing army of the type the Founders feared most deeply (for example Hamilton, in Federalist No. 29).

This Republican budget bill represents a breathtaking $300+ billion commitment to militarizing America’s borders and expanding the surveillance state under the guise of “national security.” The numbers tell a chilling story: nearly $57 billion for border walls and barriers, $45 billion for immigrant detention facilities that will rival the size of the entire prison system, and almost $30 billion to supercharge ICE into a paramilitary force with expanded powers to raid communities nationwide.

What we’re seeing here isn’t border security—it’s the systematic transformation of immigration enforcement into a militarized occupation force. The bill allocates billions for “family detention centers” (a euphemism for camps where children will be imprisoned), grants to states for building more walls, and funding for “relocation of unlawfully present aliens” that sounds disturbingly like it will require the use of violent force.

Perhaps most troubling is how this massive expansion of domestic enforcement capabilities comes wrapped in the flag of military spending. Hundreds of billions flow to weapons manufacturers and defense contractors while basic human services are starved of funding. The message is clear: this administration views immigrants not as people seeking opportunity, but as enemy combatants requiring a military response.

The infrastructure being built here—the surveillance technology, detention facilities, militarized personnel, and coordination between local and federal enforcement—creates the scaffolding for authoritarianism that could easily be turned against any group deemed “undesirable” by future administrations. Once you’ve normalized this level of militarized domestic enforcement, the definition of who deserves to be targeted has a way of expanding.

This isn’t about border security—it’s about power, control, and the profits that flow to contractors building America’s emerging police state.

Here is a comprehensive list of all the line items in the bill that add budget to law enforcement, border protection, national security, or military-related functions or agencies, ranked by size descending, drawing directly from the text of the bill:

$46,550,000,000 appropriated to the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection for the Border Infrastructure and Wall System, including construction, installation, or improvement of new or replacement primary, waterborne, and secondary barriers; access roads; barrier system attributes (cameras, lights, sensors, detection technology); and any work necessary to prepare the ground at or near the border to allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection to conduct its operations.
$45,000,000,000 appropriated to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for single adult alien detention capacity and family residential center capacity. A “family residential center” is defined as a facility used by the Department of Homeland Security to detain alien family units, including children who are not unaccompanied, encountered or apprehended by the Department.
$29,850,000,000 appropriated to the Secretary of Homeland Security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for fiscal year 2025, to remain available through September 30, 2029. These funds are designated for: hiring and training additional ICE personnel (officers, agents, investigators, and support staff), prioritizing and streamlining the hiring of retired ICE personnel; providing performance, retention, and signing bonuses to qualified ICE personnel; facilitating recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of additional ICE personnel (including investing in IT, recruitment, and marketing); transportation costs and related costs for alien departure or removal operations; information technology investments to support enforcement and removal operations (including fee collections); facility upgrades to support enforcement and removal operations; fleet modernization to support enforcement and removal operations; promoting family unity by maintaining care and custody of aliens charged only with a misdemeanor offense who entered with their child under 18 and detaining such an alien with their child; expanding, facilitating, and implementing 287(g) agreements; hiring and training additional staff for the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office and providing nonfinancial assistance to victims of crimes perpetrated by unauthorized aliens; and hiring additional attorneys and support staff within the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor to represent DHS in immigration enforcement and removal proceedings.
$10,000,000,000 appropriated to the Department of Homeland Security for the State Border Security Reinforcement Fund. These funds are for grants to eligible States and units of local government for purposes including: construction or installation of a border wall, border fencing, other barriers, or buoys along the southern border of the United States (including planning, procurement of materials, and personnel costs); any work necessary to prepare the ground at or near land borders to allow construction and maintenance of a border wall or other barrier fencing; detection and interdiction of illicit substances and aliens who have unlawfully entered the United States and committed a crime, and their transfer or referral to DHS; and relocation of unlawfully present aliens from small population centers to other domestic locations.
$10,000,000,000 appropriated to the Secretary of Homeland Security for reimbursement of costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.

May 21, 2025

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that Republicans don’t want you to see

The 2025 Republican budget bill will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit

There’s a lot of noise out there drowning out an important signal most Americans should probably know about (yes, even MAGA! Perhaps especially MAGA given the disproportionate effects this Republican budget bill is likely to have on their red state communities). That is by design — retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth refers to it as “narrative warfare” in the Russian tradition; Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone with shit;” and psychologists simply call it narcissistic personality disorder. By whatever name, today’s political information ecosystem is being manipulated to obscure the actual business of government, because the culture wars are staggeringly popular while the actual GOP agenda goes over like a lead balloon in terms of popular opinion.

So much so that the House Rules Committee plans to take up the “big, beautiful bill” for consideration, recently passed out of the Budget Committee on late Sunday night, at 1:00am in the morning. Nothing says pride like a dead of night hearing!

The Medicaid cuts that are in the Republican budget bill are especially toxic to the GOP — reportedly 75% of Americans on both sides of the aisle oppose the deep cuts to critical services that the right-wing seems hell-bent on enacting despite better ways to extract savings, like preventing private insurers from “upcoding” care to make it more expensive.

The reckless cuts to public services are meant to offset the cost of what Republicans and their billionaire donors want on the other side of the ledger: the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for their corporate donors and wealthiest Americans. Nevermind, apparently, that these tax cuts are primarily responsible (along with the George W. Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s) for the increasing debt ratio that the GOP falls all over themselves to theatrically complain about — while single-handedly and relentlessly continuing to make it worse.