Hegseth, Caine to sell $1.5T Pentagon budget to Dem skeptics
Plus: Craig urges Dem ‘hell no’ on GOP farm bill and Supreme Court weighs Trump move to end TPS.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Good Wednesday morning. Thank you for waking up with Congress Nerd Sunrise.
📌 New this morning: Hegseth, Caine to sell $1.5T Pentagon budget to Dem skeptics … Craig urges Dem ‘hell no’ on GOP farm bill and Supreme Court weighs Trump move to end TPS.
☝🏾 But first things first: Speaker Mike Johnson (R-S.C.) has another doozy of a day ahead after canceling votes Tuesday evening and finally pushing this week’s agenda out of the House Rules Committee—only to face more problems on the floor later this morning.
Johnson now has to rally his entire conference to adopt a rule that would let him reauthorize the government’s foreign surveillance powers before Thursday night’s deadline, pass a partisan farm bill that the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee can’t stand (more on that below), and approve the Senate’s budget resolution to fund ICE and CBP through the rest of President Donald Trump’s term.
The White House, meanwhile, wants him to stop lollygagging and bring up the Senate bill to reopen DHS agencies unrelated to immigration enforcement before the stopgap money runs out at week’s end.
As usual, the speaker has his work cut out for him.
He can only lose two votes—give or take, depending on attendance—and Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) are already publicly opposed. Johnson’s whip operation, notably, tends to start on the floor—not before, as was the case under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—and House conservatives have a habit of talking a big game before ultimately falling in line.
The action starts at 10:30 a.m. and will likely drag well into the night. I hope you ate your Wheaties.
📬 Get in touch: michael@onceuponahill.com
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GOVERNMENT FUNDING
Hegseth, Caine to sell $1.5T Pentagon budget to Dem skeptics
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine head to the Hill this morning to sell the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget before the House Armed Services Committee—a price tag that’s already hitting resistance from Democrats.
It will be Hegseth’s first appearance before Congress since the war in Iran started.
Top House Democrats aren’t just balking at the size of the defense increase. They’re zeroing in on the tradeoffs, arguing the proposal pairs a massive Pentagon boost with cuts to housing, health care and education—areas they say are central to lowering costs and improving economic mobility.
“We’re willing to be at the table, but you cannot cut healthcare and supplemental nutrition. You cannot cut programs that Americans rely on all for the purpose of defense,” House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) said Tuesday. “We cannot support a budget that only supports the DOD and Pentagon and Pete Hegseth while turning our back on the American people and the struggles that they face.”
Vice Chair Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) is taking a similar line, arguing he won’t back more Pentagon funding without a strategy reset that reflects lessons from the Iran war. He pointed to three early takeaways: U.S. defensive munitions are already being depleted, even a less capable military like Iran has managed to hit U.S. bases with meaningful damage, and the cost imbalance between high-end U.S. interceptors and low-cost drones is unsustainable.
“Until the Department of Defense comes up with a new strategy, they should not be asking for any more funds,” Lieu added.
The administration argues the roughly 66% jump over the current $900 billion-plus budget is necessary to counter global threats, with investments aimed at force modernization, the defense industrial base and naval expansion—including 18 new “battle force” ships—as well as pay increases and a proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system.
At the same time, the broader Trump budget would cut non-defense discretionary spending by about $73 billion, or roughly 10% below 2026 levels. That includes a $10.7 billion reduction to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $15.8 billion from Health and Human Services and $2.3 billion from the Education Department.
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FOOD SECURITY
Craig urges Dem ‘hell no’ on GOP farm bill
House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (D-Minn.) has been urging Democratic leadership to whip against the GOP’s five-year farm bill as the House moves to take it up today in a bid to stiffen Senate Democrats’ leverage ahead of what she wants to be a bipartisan compromise.
Craig’s core objection is straightforward: the bill would effectively lock in the GOP’s earlier changes to Title IV—the SNAP section—by extending that policy baseline for the life of the farm bill, rather than reopening it for negotiation.
“It’s a bad bill. If Republicans want to have a bipartisan farm bill, then they’re going to have to reengage because, remember, they got to get to 60 [votes] in the Senate. And so my message to Democrats is, let’s not do their work for them,” Craig told me. “Let’s force them back to the negotiating table by sending a ‘hell no’ on the House version, and make sure that we give our Senate colleagues an opportunity to negotiate a truly bipartisan farm bill that we all could support.”
Title IV took a hit in the OBBBA. The law reduced federal spending on SNAP by roughly $180–$300 billion over 10 years, depending on the estimate—one of the largest cuts in the program’s history.
Rather than slashing benefits across the board, Republicans rewrote the rules to expand work requirements, shift costs to states, tighten updates to the formula that sets benefit levels, and put downward pressure on enrollment over time.
Beyond SNAP, the GOP farm bill would extend core agriculture programs through roughly 2031, locking in a multi-year baseline across commodities and conservation while emphasizing domestic production, supply chains, and national security over some of the climate and nutrition priorities Democrats advanced in the 2018 law.
Congress hasn’t passed a new five-year farm bill since 2018, leaning instead on a series of short-term extensions—most recently punting it into this year.
The farm bill was long a bipartisan trade: nutrition programs for Democrats, farm supports for Republicans. But that deal has all but broken down in recent years.
Fights over SNAP funding, work requirements, and benefit levels have hardened along ideological lines, while disputes over commodity supports, crop insurance, and conservation funding have turned more regional and partisan. The coalition that typically carries a five-year bill is getting harder to hold together, as we’ll likely see in the House this week.
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IMMIGRATION
Supreme Court weighs Trump move to end TPS
The Supreme Court takes up a high-stakes immigration case today that could determine whether the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian nationals.
At issue in the consolidated cases—Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot—is whether the administration can legally revoke those protections for roughly 350,000 people, or whether courts can step in to review how that decision was made.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who recently led a successful House effort to extend Haiti’s TPS designation, said the uncertainty is already taking a toll.
“The anxiety is real because people can’t plan their lives. They’re living with uncertainty and they don’t know if they’re going to be deported back to a place that is very dangerous,” she said, urging the justices to uphold what she emphasized is a lawful status.
The Trump administration argues that federal law gives the Homeland Security secretary broad authority over TPS decisions and shields them from judicial review.
Challengers counter that courts can—and should—review whether the administration followed required legal procedures before moving to terminate protections. Haitian and Syrian TPS holders also argue the decision was tainted by unconstitutional racial animus, pointing to past comments by President Trump.
The stakes extend well beyond this case.
A ruling for the administration could make it easier to unwind protections for the broader TPS population—about 1.3 million people from 17 countries, including Venezuelans.
For now, lower court rulings are keeping the current protections in place while the case plays out. A decision from the Supreme Court is expected later this summer.
Meanwhile, Pressley is teaming up with Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) to push a Haiti TPS bill in the Senate and has joined an amicus brief led by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) backing the program ahead of today’s arguments.
“This is the right thing to do,” Pressley said. “It’s common sense, smart policy, and I hope they’ll uphold the law.”