Fraud
This week in the House is Fraud Week based on the large number of bills likely to receive a vote that in some way are intended to decrease or eliminate many different kinds of fraud. Example bills up for a vote include:
- H.R. 428: Bonuses for Cost-Cutters and Fraud Preventers Act, as amended which would expand the opportunities for cash bonuses to staff who can cut costs. We see no way that this could go wrong and instead incentivize new ways of defrauding the government.
- H.R. 6338: Stop Illegal Fishing Act
- H.R. 7892: No Aid for Ghost Students Act of 2026
Funding
One bill will likely become law this week if it passes the House:
This is the much discussed reconciliation bill which will provide even more money to the DHS agencies ICE and CBP through 2029. (Our post from this past Friday with more detail
FISA Section 702
This part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Section 702, is controversial because it can result in spying on US citizens without warrants ever being issued.
There are opponents of Section 702 as it’s currently constructed in both parties which makes passing a renewal without some modifications difficult.
Further, while it is true that the authorities in Section 702 will lapse this week, that doesn’t mean that all surveillance under its authority ends immediately.
Why not? Because there is a court, the FISA Court, which handles things related to foreign intelligence surveillance. In March, they certified the use of Section 702 through next year (while limiting the use of certain tools by certain agencies).
Further still, the President announced last week that he was making the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, the acting Director of National Intelligence.
The combination of pre-existing objections to Section 702, the fact that it won’t really end if the law lapses and Trump’s preference for Pulte as acting Director of National lntelligence all point to another last-minute short-term reauthorization of the law as it currently exists or possibly of it lapsing.
Committee Meetings
There are 46 committee meetings across both chambers of Congress this week. Several about about national defense appropriations and closed to the public. There are some others of potential interest and long-term effect:
- Nuclear Permitting Reform: Legislation to Advance Efficient Licensing; this covers three pieces of legislation aiming to speed the nuclear permitting process.
- Hearings to examine the President’s proposed budget request for fiscal year 2027 for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
- Senate Judiciary to examine, among other things, legislation that would permit televised Supreme Court hearings and another which would expand media coverage (including televised proceedings) within the federal court system.
Fraud, Funding, and FISA was originally published by GovTrack.us and is republished with permission.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.