How Congress Uses Appropriations Riders to Control Agency Operations

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When the Department of Homeland Security entered a partial shutdown on February 15, 2026, something strange happened. Or rather, something strange didn’t happen. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents kept making arrests. Customs and Border Protection officers kept staffing checkpoints. The machinery of immigration enforcement rolled forward as if Congress hadn’t failed to pass a funding bill.

The reason reveals something most Americans don’t understand about how federal agencies work: Congress can attach rules to spending bills that agencies must follow. More importantly, deliberate structural decisions can make those rules irrelevant.

Congressional Power Over Federal Spending

Here’s what the Constitution says: no money can be drawn from the Treasury except through appropriations made by Congress. Not a single dollar. Every federal agency depends entirely on lawmakers deciding to fund it, year after year.

That’s supposed to be the legislature’s nuclear option. The executive branch can propose, implement, and enforce all it wants—but without money, none of it happens. The Framers designed it this way intentionally, giving the legislative branch direct control over the one thing every government needs: cash.

So why didn’t it work in February 2026?

How Appropriations Riders Work

Congress can add extra rules to spending bills—these additions are called riders. They often have nothing to do with the bill’s main purpose. Lawmakers can include this language because appropriations bills are “must-pass” legislation—the government literally cannot function without them.

This creates unusual power. A standalone bill proposing new policy might get blocked in the Senate through a delay tactic that requires 60 votes to stop. But a rider embedded in an appropriations bill? That’s different. The appropriations bill itself must pass. The alternative is a government shutdown.

Riders work by specifying not just how much money agencies get, but what they can and cannot do with it. “None of the funds made available in this Act shall be used to…” is the standard formula. It’s a negative constraint, which turns out to matter legally. Lawmakers have clearer constitutional authority to prevent spending than to mandate it.

The Hyde Amendment provides the template. Since 1977, this single rider has been attached to Health and Human Services appropriations bills every year to prevent federal funds from paying for most abortions. Not a statute. Not a regulation. Budget language, renewed annually, constraining federal health policy for nearly fifty years.

Riders in Immigration Enforcement

The use of riders to control immigration policy isn’t new. Republicans used riders attempting to block the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Democrats used riders to protect it. The pattern shows lawmakers regularly attempting to use riders as a tool for controlling enforcement.

Success depends on specificity. “No funds shall be used to detain children for longer than 20 days” creates a clear, enforceable constraint. If ICE spends money violating this language, it violates the appropriations restriction directly.

“ICE shall prioritize detention of individuals convicted of violent felonies” creates a constraint that depends on executive interpretation. What counts as “prioritize”? How much discretion remains? That kind of rider is harder to enforce when agencies develop creative readings.

Whether riders can restrict executive functions has never been fully resolved by the Supreme Court. Enforcement depends on political will, not legal text alone.

Multi-Year Funding and Lost Leverage

Multi-year appropriations provide budget authority that carries forward. Agencies can continue committing and spending funds even if lawmakers fail to pass new appropriations.

When Democrats attempted to use appropriations leverage in February 2026, ICE could continue functioning because its funding already existed. A rider attached to the annual DHS appropriations bill saying “no funds shall be used for warrantless searches” would be legally murky if the targeted funds were already appropriated through multi-year funds.

During a government shutdown, federal employees designated as essential workers who can keep working during shutdowns can continue working without pay if their duties involve protecting life or property.

It was a deliberate decision to move immigration enforcement funding outside the normal annual appropriations process that would create annual opportunities for lawmakers to attach riders.

Why Democrats’ Demands Weren’t Enacted as Riders

The specific restrictions Democrats wanted were clear and substantial: judicial warrants before entering private property, mandatory body cameras, prohibition on masks, visible identification, use-of-force standards, independent investigations of shooting incidents.

These demands could be drafted as appropriations riders. “None of the funds made available in this Act shall be used to conduct a warrantless search of private property.” “No funds shall be expended for any ICE operation in which agents are not wearing visible identification showing badge number and name.“

First, the Republican-controlled Senate had reduced incentive to negotiate, knowing that ICE already possessed multi-year funding outside the annual appropriations process. If Democrats attempted to attach riders to the DHS bill, Republicans could refuse—forcing a shutdown while knowing ICE would continue operating. The political calculus changes when appropriations leverage is real versus symbolic.

Democrats appear to have attempted to use shutdown leverage rather than legislative mechanisms to extract concessions—betting that pressure would force Republican negotiators to agree to policy changes. This political strategy ultimately failed.

The failure to use riders represents a structural problem in how lawmakers attempt to control agencies in the modern era. Riders work most effectively when attached to spending bills that must pass, but their effectiveness depends on the underlying annual appropriations structure. That structure has been eroded by the growth of multi-year appropriations and reconciliation bills.

When lawmakers provided multi-year funding for ICE through reconciliation rather than annual appropriations, they simultaneously enabled aggressive operations and removed the annual appropriations leverage that would normally constrain such operations. This wasn’t policy drift. It was a deliberate choice about how to structure executive power.

Alternative Mechanisms for Congressional Control

If appropriations riders prove inadequate—as this shutdown suggests—what alternatives exist?

Standalone legislation offers greater specificity and clearer legal force than riders, but faces higher procedural obstacles. Authorizing legislation could theoretically impose stricter controls on ICE operations. But authorizing legislation requires 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, while riders embedded in must-pass appropriations bills require only majority support in both chambers.

Congressional appropriations committees have traditionally used the power of the purse to compel agency responsiveness: if an agency fails to comply with committee requests, appropriators can threaten funding reductions. But this tool depends on the threat being credible—requiring appropriations to be needed and discretionary (spending Congress can choose to increase or decrease)—which cannot work if funding is multi-year and already provided.

The comparison with other policy domains shows riders working more effectively where the underlying appropriations structure remains annual. Environmental riders prohibiting EPA spending on certain regulatory actions have proven effective partly because EPA funding is appropriated annually. Riders on Justice Department appropriations restricting marijuana prosecutions have proven more tractable partly because DOJ appropriations are renewed each year, creating annual pressure points.

By contrast, riders constraining agencies with multi-year appropriations operate in a weaker legal position. A rider in an annual appropriations bill saying “no funds shall be used” for an action is clearer when applied to current-year funds, but becomes less enforceable when applied to funds appropriated in prior years with multi-year availability.

Both parties have recognized that reconciliation can provide multi-year budget authority—the ability to spend money without asking Congress each year—that escapes annual appropriations leverage. Democrats used reconciliation to provide long-term funding for green energy investments and healthcare programs. Republicans used it to provide long-term funding for defense and enforcement.

The result is a paradoxical erosion of the legislature’s constitutional “power of the purse” precisely through mechanisms designed to exercise that power more efficiently. By appropriating large sums for multi-year periods, lawmakers make themselves less able to condition spending on agency compliance with congressional demands.

The Constitutional Problem

The DHS shutdown raises fundamental questions about separation of powers in the modern budgetary state. The Framers envisioned the appropriations power as the legislature’s primary tool for constraining executive overreach. Yet in contemporary governance, presidents have expanded discretion over appropriations through creative interpretation. Executive agencies have generated their own funds through user fees and revolving accounts. And lawmakers have increasingly provided multi-year direct spending authority that escapes annual review.

The current shutdown illustrates these tensions concretely. Officers kill civilians in controversial circumstances. Lawmakers wish to impose constraints on future practices. They attempt to use appropriations leverage to impose those constraints. Yet an executive agency funded through multi-year appropriations can continue operating regardless of annual appropriations refusal.

The Constitution says lawmakers control all federal spending. Appropriations were made by law. But the practical effect is to insulate an agency from precisely the annual appropriations leverage that the Constitution’s spending clause seems designed to enable.

Legal scholars examining how Congress could reclaim its appropriations power emphasize that courts have traditionally been reluctant to intervene in appropriations disputes, viewing them as political rather than legal questions. Lawmakers must solve this problem through their own procedural choices and structural reforms, not through litigation.

This creates a problem: the legislators who benefit from strong executive agencies in their preferred policy domains have little incentive to restrict executive discretion through appropriations procedures. Republicans supporting strong enforcement have no interest in restricting ICE through appropriations riders. Democrats supporting expansive environmental regulation have no interest in constraining EPA through appropriations limitations.

Restoring Congressional Control

To restore appropriations as an effective constraint on executive behavior, lawmakers would need to restructure how they appropriate funds for enforcement and other major agencies.

First, ending multi-year appropriations for spending Congress can choose to increase or decrease and returning to annual appropriations cycles would restore the annual pressure points at which lawmakers negotiate appropriations terms. This is politically unlikely because both parties benefit from multi-year funding when they control the executive branch.

Second, reforming the reconciliation process to prevent its use for policy changes that aren’t really about money would require congressional rules changes. Again, politically unlikely given that both parties use reconciliation to bypass normal legislative procedures.

Third, more aggressive use of riders during the current annual appropriations process could constrain agencies even without multi-year funding changes. Riders can specify procedural requirements. For example: warrant requirements, body camera mandates, and identification standards. These should theoretically be attachable to annual DHS bills if lawmakers maintain political unity.

The fact that Democrats did not successfully impose such riders in 2026 reflects political rather than legal obstacles. Republican-controlled chambers had no incentive to accept riders constraining Republican-preferred policies, especially when the administration had already secured alternative funding through reconciliation.

The power remains. The institutional structures that made it effective have weakened through congressional choices, accumulated over decades. The Constitution grants lawmakers the power of appropriations but does not mandate how they must exercise this power. They can choose to appropriate large amounts of money with no time limit, essentially letting executive agencies decide how to spend the money with minimal constraints. They can choose to use reconciliation to provide direct spending authority that escapes annual review.

These are congressional choices, not constraints imposed by the Constitution. But these choices, made individually for short-term political advantage, have collectively eroded the legislature’s practical ability to control executive branch spending and behavior through the appropriations process.

Broader Implications

The February 2026 DHS shutdown matters beyond one policy area. It reveals how lawmakers have systematically weakened their own constitutional power through structural decisions about funding mechanisms.

Appropriations riders remain the legislature’s most powerful tool for controlling agency behavior when they work—avoiding the usual delays and presidential rejection by including them in spending bills Congress must pass. Historical precedents from the Hyde Amendment demonstrate that riders, properly drafted and strategically deployed, can constrain executive action for decades.

But the structural decisions lawmakers make about how to appropriate funds—multi-year versus annual appropriations, reconciliation versus traditional appropriations, direct spending versus discretionary spending—fundamentally shape whether riders can exercise their intended constraining effect.

In the case of enforcement, the specific decision to provide multi-year reconciliation funding for ICE and CBP had the direct practical effect of insulating those agencies from precisely the type of appropriations leverage Democrats attempted to exercise in February 2026. This wasn’t an inadvertent consequence. It was an anticipated effect, at least by some members who supported the legislation.

The shutdown proceeded without achieving Democratic objectives because the underlying political choice had already been made through the reconciliation process: to fund operations outside the normal annual appropriations cycle that would enable lawmakers to attach restrictive riders.

Looking forward, the legislature faces a choice about how to exercise its constitutional appropriations power. It can continue allowing multi-year appropriations and reconciliation spending bills to split up its power to control spending. Or it can choose to restructure appropriations procedures to restore annual review and appropriations leverage.

The principle of congressional power over appropriations remains. How effectively lawmakers exercise this power in practice depends on choices they continue to make about their own procedures and structures. Those choices, right now, favor executive discretion over congressional constraint. That’s not a bug in the system. It’s the system working exactly as lawmakers have designed it to work.

If you don’t like how federal agencies operate, the problem isn’t that the legislature lacks power. The problem is that it has chosen not to use the power it has, or has structured that power in ways that make it ineffective when convenient. The riders are there. The constitutional authority is there. What’s missing is the political will to structure appropriations in ways that make congressional control meaningful rather than symbolic.

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