Congress

Lawmakers bemoan Trump’s latest power grab: Troop pay

Published

11 months ago

October 20, 2025

Members of Congress say they’re happy military troops are getting paid during the shutdown — but not necessarily that President Donald Trump is claiming vast power over the federal spending process to do it.

In a sweeping order last week, Trump gave both the Pentagon and the White House budget office the green light to use “any funds” left over for the current fiscal year to bankroll paychecks for active-duty servicemembers, which were due to be withheld last Wednesday amid the government funding standoff.

The move took the onus off lawmakers to vote on standalone legislation to pay troops during the funding lapse — something House and Senate GOP leadership had resisted, fearing it would reduce pressure on Democrats to vote for the Republican plan to reopen the government as the minority party demands bipartisan negotiations on health care.

The Senate is scheduled to consider legislation this week that would allow members of the military and other federal workers to receive pay while the government remains shuttered. It’s far from certain it will attract the necessary 60 votes to advance or would ever be brought to the floor in the House, which has been in recess since passage of the GOP-backed stopgap more than a month ago.

Against this backdrop, lawmakers who oppose Trump’s troop funding gambit have been careful to couch their criticism of the method with support for the end result.

“Look, I want the troops to be paid,” said Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, a senior appropriator and likely the Senate’s next Democratic whip. “But, as usual, they find the most illegal way to do everything.”

But Republicans are also among the many lawmakers highly skeptical about the legality of Trump’s actions. The president invoked his authority as commander in chief to claim missed paychecks would pose an “unacceptable threat to military readiness” — but the law requires the president to seek approval from Congress before moving around money, and there are many constraints to what can be done even with lawmakers’ passive consent.

“While it’s a desired outcome, there’s a process that’s required — by Constitution and by law — for Congress to be not only consulted but engaged,” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a brief interview last week.

And the issue isn’t going away. According to two White House officials not authorized to speak publicly, Trump will continue to use funding for military paychecks during the shutdown, if Congress doesn’t pass a government funding bill before the next pay date at month’s end.

At the same time, Trump administration officials have not provided top congressional appropriators with details about how much cash the White House believes is available for use, nor have they submitted requests to Capitol Hill to reprogram any money.

“There’s a way we take care of this. It’s called appropriations. It’s called reprogramming. And I don’t think that process is being respected,” said Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, another leading Republican appropriator and frequent Trump critic.

The Trump administration privately told lawmakers that it tapped $6.5 billion from a pot of about $10 billion in unspent military research and development funding to pay troops ahead of the Oct. 15 paycheck date.

“The appropriations committee in general believes that it should get more information and that we should receive a list of canceled work” and “contracts,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters last week.

On Friday the White House sent lawmakers a five-page document detailing its argument for why the president has the power to use funding for a different purpose than Congress mandated in law. The bulleted list of talking points cites examples like then-President George Washington tapping military funding in 1794 for the militia to respond to the Whiskey Rebellion.

But administration officials have not relayed how much other money they believe could be used to pay troops when the next paychecks are due on Oct. 31.

The White House is already hunting for any available money to address other funding shortfalls during the shutdown to support politically popular programs. That includes options to pay at least a segment of federal workers, and potentially reopen key loans for struggling farmers amid quiet pressure from Senate GOP Leader John Thune and other farm-state lawmakers, according to two Trump officials and two senior Hill Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter.

White House officials also need to figure out how to manage the dilemma over SNAP, the country’s largest food assistance program that serves 42 million low-income Americans, which will start to run out of funds Nov. 1.

The federal government’s top watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, typically weighs in on the legality of shifting funding during a government shutdown. When Trump was president during the last, lengthy funding lapse that ended in early 2019, GAO concluded that his administration twice violated the law with its funding moves, warning that officials would face fines and up to two years in prison for future violations.

This time around, however, GAO has yet to receive any lawmaker requests to review Trump’s maneuver to pay members of the military — even as the independent oversight agency is working to determine whether the administration has violated the law by firing federal workers during the shutdown.

“GAO has a process it goes through to determine whether we do work and when, which we are working through,” a spokesperson for the office said in a statement.

Meanwhile, not everyone is questioning the legal standing of Trump’s actions.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he supported Trump’s move “once the House made it plain that they were unwilling to come back to do a military pay bill.”

He added, “I’m glad they were able to find undesignated dollars within the defense budget they could use. As long as they keep it within defense, I think that they’re on solid ground.”

Republicans also know there’s at least one major deterrent for lawmakers to legally challenge Trump’s maneuvers to send paychecks to military troops: any outspoken critic risks being branded as unpatriotic.

“If the Democrats want to go to court and challenge troops being paid,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters last week, “bring it.”

Connor O’Brien and Leo Shane III contributed to this report.

Congress

Cruz blocks Senate Democrats’ bid to pass AI safety bill

Published

2 hours ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A Democratic trio attempted to pass an artificial intelligence bill via a unanimous consent request on Tuesday but were blocked on the Senate floor.

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) sought to pass their Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act using the procedural mechanism, which allows expedited consideration of legislation but fails if one senator opposes it.

“The whole world has recognized that we’ve got to do something,” Warner said in a speech on the floor. “We should not miss the moment to put a safety protocol in place now.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) objected to the bill, preventing any chance of passage.

“Congress must not legislate on the issue of artificial intelligence hastily or in a closed manner,” he said on the floor, adding that it gave some in the government too much power to dictate the technology that could be permitted to be released.

As some lawmakers grow concerned over dire warnings from AI labs’ top executives about the technology’s risk to humanity, Congress’ attempts to legislate AI guardrails have largely stalled.

In the past few weeks, two other AI-related bills, the Ratepayer Protection Act and AI Emergency Button Act, were also nixed in an attempt to pass them unanimously.

Warner, Schatz and Kim’s new bill would have established a new safety board within the Commerce Department to vet models before they are deployed and set safety standards for the industry. It would also have created a reporting process for safety and security incidents.

Congress

Darline Graham rips Jack Smith for obtaining her late brother’s phone records

Published

3 hours ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Darline Graham sought to take up her brother’s mantle Tuesday, going after former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining the late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s phone data.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the South Carolina Republican told Smith as he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that the anguish the prosecutor caused her brother “makes me sick.”

Lindsey Graham, until his unexpected death in July, was among the most vocal in his outrage over revelations that Smith secretly collected electronic data from GOP lawmakers as part of the Biden-era investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The late senator was also unapologetic in his support for a provision tucked into a government funding package, which was later repealed, allowing senators to sue the federal government for $500,000 or more if they discover their electronic records were seized without notification — language specifically designed to compensate Smith’s targets.

But Smith replied that Lindsey Graham was not a target of his investigation and was not suspected of wrongdoing — in fact, he considered Darline Graham’s brother “a patriotic public servant” who likely would have been a “witness” in his case against Trump for attempted election subversion.

“Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making,” Smith told Darline Graham. “He found them to be false.”

Congress

Federal watchdog says Trump’s $810M funding cancellation is unconstitutional

Published

4 hours ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The federal government’s internal watchdog told Congress Tuesday that it has concluded President Donald Trump acted unlawfully in unilaterally canceling $810 million in federal funding.

In a letter to congressional leaders obtained by Blue Light News, the Government Accountability Office’s top lawyer panned Trump’s declaration Friday that he is nixing money Congress appropriated through a controversial budget maneuver called a “pocket rescission.”

“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse,” GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez wrote,

adding that “Congress did not cede this important power” by enacting the 1970s impoundment law intended to stop presidents from withholding money Congress approves.

“Any withholding of appropriated funds beyond their date of expiration, regardless of size, subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” Perez added. “The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind.”

It is unclear what practical effect, if any, the letter will have on the interbranch funding fight. Outside groups sued the administration last year over a prior pocket rescission, but the Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling that they did not have standing to challenge the matter. The Trump administration has argued that only the head of the GAO is able to sue under the 52-year-old law governing rescissions.