'Blank check': Critics call Trump’s budget 'a slush fund' to 'spend however he wants'
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media, after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to the power of federal judges by restricting their ability to grant broad legal relief in cases as the justices acted in a legal fight over President Donald Trump's bid to limit birthright citizenship, in the Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington D.C., June 27, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
The Dispatch reports President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans splashed “border security” with $165 billion in new spending with their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but experts are worried about the “absence of accountability measures for how the money will be spent.”
“It’s a blank check,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “There’s no accountability. There’s no oversight. We already know that the [DHS] rearranges money and moves around accounts whenever it feels like it. … This is a slush fund for the president to spend however he wants.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) currently has an $8 billion annual budget, while Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has a current annual budget of around $20 billion. All that changes with OBBBA, however, but the actual accounting appears “rife with redundancies, overlaps, and vague wording.
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For example, the Dispatch reports the bill appropriated $10 billion to DHS to reimburse “costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.” But the provision doesn’t specify any real mission, time frame for the reimbursement, or which DHS subdivision is getting reimbursed.
When reporters asked DHS officials for clarification the agency responded with one-page press release from a signing ceremony. The document made no mention of the $10 billion.
Meanwhile, the Dispatch reports big ticket items in the immigration enforcement section of Trump’s bill provide cover for smaller endeavors that ferret away money for “similarly obscure purposes.”
The House’s version of the bill dedicated $40 million to immigrant background checks that included examinations for “gang-related tattoos or gang-related markings.” At the time, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) could not tell Dispatch reporters whether the funds were going toward examiners’ compensation, identification technology, or new facilities to house migrant youth while examinations were underway. By the time the bill made it out of the Senate, the Dispatch reports there is no telling how much of the $300 million allocation to the Office of Refugee Resettlement handles tattoo inspection or any ancillary costs that come of it.
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The Dispatch also can’t say exactly how the bill distributes $10 billion to states for their part in border enforcement, but Gov. Greg Abbott claims Texas’ Operation Lone Star cost the state $11 billion.
Reporters also note the OBBBA’s homeland security section features plenty of spending unrelated to border security, including security for the 2028 Olympic Games and $300 million in reimbursements to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for “extraordinary law enforcement personnel costs” —for protecting the president’s residences.
Bier says one of the bill’s most notorious sleight-of-hand acts is creating permanent infrastructure and jobs that will add trillions in debt while being difficult for a future Congress to remove.
“I think that’s one of the main budgetary gimmicks here that hides the true cost of what they’re doing,” said Bier.
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Read the full Dispatch report at this link.
