Happy Super Bowl weekend! The Senate Budget Committee has just released the text of the budget resolution that will unlock reconciliation if the House agrees to adopt it.

Here's the text. And here are the summary tables.

Procedurally, this represents the approach preferred by some of the Senate to do two major fiscal bills this year, rather than the "one beautiful bill" favored by Speaker Johnson and, with asterisks, President Trump.

The focus of this first bill is border security, defense, and energy. Border security and energy are, of course, two of President Trump's first-year priorities.

The resolution is mostly a placeholder for now, but there are details on the border side, providing funding for the wall as well as technology to secure the border, increased detention space, increased budget for ICE, and immigration enforcement-related grants to state and local law enforcement bodies (with the specifics TBD, apparently).

On the defense side, there is a welcome emphasis on naval power and specifically shipbuilding and the Navy's industrial base.

On energy, the focus is on offshore lease sales and ending the methane emissions fee.

Finally, "the bill's projected increased annual spending of $85.5 billion will be paid for by a projected $85.5 billion in reduced annual spending."

Let's see how that goes.

Policy News You Need To Know

#VirtueSignaling — President Trump has announced he will sign an executive order next week to reverse the Biden Administration's push for paper straws. This doesn't seem like a very big deal, and in a sense, of course it isn't. But the campaign against plastic straws was so loathsome because it embodies everything wrong with the current woke left: contempt for individual liberty, niggling micro-management of the citizenry, virtue signaling, and, of course, ineffectiveness, since the problem of the plastic in the oceans comes from China and India, not America.

#Immigration #LaborMarkets — New January data shows that most job growth is still going to immigrants. The common repsonse to this is to say that this is driven by demographics, not immigration. Well, yes and no. A near-record share of working-age US-born men remain out of the labor force, and one reason for that is surely that wages are not high enough, and one reason why wages are not high enough is immigration.

#AI — A new report by an AI analysis company suggests that DeepSeek spent a lot more money than it said, using top-tier Nvidia GPUs that are not supposed to exist in China, to train its model.

#Trade — According to a NBER study, in the period 1870-1909—a period often cited by President Trump as showing that tariffs are good for the economy—, tariffs on imported manufactured goods in the U.S. were associated with reduced labor productivity in affected industries.

#Vice — According to a new study in JAMA, since drug legalization, new schizophrenia cases linked to heavy cannabis use have tripled.

Friday Essays

Mark A. DiPlacido and Oren Cass have a big new essay out on industrial policy.

One good thing about having a faithful Catholic as Vice President is that theological debates can become public policy debates. JD Vance started a debate on the traditional Christian doctrine known as "ordo amoris", namely that most Christians are called, most of the time, to prioritize how they exercise charity towards their neighbors, starting with themselves, their family, their community, and their nation. This explains why so many Christians support a slogan like "America First." In The Josias, Fr. Joseph Hudson, OSB explains what the Ordo Amoris is in Christian theology.