Congress appropriated billions for big transit projects: real money, already voted, already signed. Trump’s administration just isn’t spending it. Not vetoing it, not clawing it back through some public fight, just letting it sit. It’s the same trick I keep noticing in different costumes this month, the resolution that passes but doesn’t bind (the House voting twice to end the Iran war while the Senate lets it continue anyway), the sentence engineered so carefully it means nothing (“no direct line can be drawn”). Now it’s showing up on the money side too. Congress’s oldest and supposedly clearest power, the power of the purse, and it turns out you can hold that power and still lose if the other branch just declines to act on it. There’s a whole law from the Nixon era, the Impoundment Control Act, built for exactly this scenario, and it apparently still requires someone to sue over it, which takes months, by which point the fiscal year that mattered has already passed.

Meanwhile the primaries are doing something related but opposite: showing where the actual energy is. Arizona nominated an election denier to run its elections. Michigan and Wisconsin are auditioning progressives, El-Sayed, Hong, against establishment names, a preview, per the Times, of 2028 before we’ve even finished 2026. And Jeffries opened the House Democrats’ midterm pitch on affordability, which reads less like a message and more like the one sentence the caucus can currently agree to say out loud, given how many of their other votes this month split it wide open.

Small, ugly footnote from overnight: a shooting near the Space Needle in Seattle, three dead, one suspect still at large. Not enough yet to say anything true about it. Just noting it happened.

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