Starving the Feds: The Last Option to Peacefully End the Repression

The federal government runs out of money at midnight on September 30. If Senate Democrats are serious about stopping the regime's de facto storm troopers from continuing their reign of political terror in D.C., Los Angeles, and any other cities Trump targets next, they need to refuse to allow any further appropriations bills to reach the Senate floor, through the 2026 midterm elections if necessary.

Late Friday, I learned that the building where a professional acquaintance lives at was raided by regime elements. My friend was not the target; another far less fortunate soul was the victim of a regime terror squad--just one of many such victims since Trump seized control of the D.C. police force and deployed hundreds of D.C. National Guard (NG) troops across the nation’s capital.

According to NPR, hundreds in the District came out to protest the regime's unconstitutional assaults on the rights and the persons living in the city--even as three Red state governors pledge some of their own NG troops for deployment to a city clearly under siege.

Over 2000 miles away from Washington, a man in San Bernardino in his car refused to provide his ID to masked and unidentified regime elements--after which the "agents" attempted to break into his vehicle, prompting the man to drive away at high speed, no doubt fearing for his life. As he pulled away he no doubt felt his terror justified as at least one regime agent opened fire on the vehicle.  

Trump's enlistment of Red state governors and their NG troops is clearly part of the regime's "lessons learned" from its allegedly immigration-related crackdown in California earlier this summer.

Trump's unilateral call up of 2000 California NG troops for nonexistent "riots" and "insurrection" in the state remains under legal challenge by the Newsom administration in Sacramento. It's now clear that the regime's playbook has been altered, shifting to calling upon Trump loyalist governors in Red states to provide at least several hundred of their own NG personnel for out-of-state missions targeting states or cities under the control of local and/or state Democrats. It's naked, partisan political repression and coercion--and at present it's being paid for with our tax dollars.

The precise legal mechanism for this version of political repression is 32 U.S. Code § 502, which allows the federal government to pay for the deployment of NG troops out of their own states for federal missions while still remaining under the control of their respective governors. In this case, the regime is treating the statutory command-and-control mechanism as a legal fiction, deploying and directing the out-of-state NG forces in DC as it pleases.

District Mayor Muriel Bowser has never requested NG elements from West Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina or any other state to help with crime control in D.C.--which makes sense since the District's crime rate is at a 30-year low. And if she did need some short-term help from NG elements, she could've requested that Trump call up the D.C. NG, as well as sought help from Maryland and Virginia.

Trump's militarization of immigration enforcement and "crime control" is, of course, nothing more than a smokescreen for preparing for further such political repression operations in other areas of the country under the control of elected Democrats.

As I've noted before, earlier this year Georgetown University Press published my first book on the history of domestic surveillance and political repression. Based on more than a decade of field research at archives across the country, I can tell you with certainty that not even during the worst of the McCarthy era of Cold War hysteria did we have federal cops and troops on our streets stopping, detaining, and in some cases literally disappearing people. What Trump is doing is new, unconstitutional, and utterly authoritarian.

It's also within the power of Senate Democrats to stop it in its tracks.

The Senate relies on the concept of "unanimous consent" (UC) in order to move major legislation like federal funding bills. We are now a little over six weeks away from the federal government running out of money to operate--at midnight on September 30, to be precise. If 41 Senate Democrats refused unanimous consent for any funding bills after September 30, 2025, and no appropriations were passed, there would indeed be no federal funding available for these Title 32 political repression operations.

This would effectively force any such NG deployments to rely on:

·       State funding only (State Active Duty)

·       Presidential federalization under Title 10 (which triggers Posse Comitatus restrictions)

·       Or cessation of the deployments

In my view, any UC refusal needs to be all-encompassing--in other words the entire federal government, not just the Title 32 funding I've already mentioned.

That's because the majority of Trump's campaign of political terror relies on tens of thousands of ICE, HSI, DEA, ATF, and the FBI--the so-called "law enforcement agents" who have been Trump's primary instruments of repression since he took office again in January.  

Those agents, like those NG troops, have to eat, pay their bills, etc. A federal government shutdown would, within weeks or at most a few months, make those on the federal repression payroll seek other employment or starve and become the targets of collection agencies.

Democrats are very fond of government spending. Many will balk at this proposal because it would inevitably negatively impact programs and constituencies Democrats have traditionally championed.

This is a moment when their failure to break that habit and overcome their hesitation to act decisively to end funding for Trump's political repression machine will lead to human suffering on a scale none of them have witnessed in their lifetimes. Such a failure would also accelerate the fall of the Republic and potentially put us on an inevitable path to societal breakdown and civil war.

These are the stakes. Senate Democrats ignore them at the peril of us all.

REMINDER: You can get 30% off my new book about past episodes of unconstitutional surveillance and political repression, the Triumph of Fear, by going directly to the Georgetown University Press website and using the code TGUF...and this code can be used by anybody, so spread the word and thanks for being a Sentinel subscriber!