Throughout American history, the true measure of reform has not been found in language, intentions, or symbolic gestures, but in budgets.
By Matthew A. McIntosh
Public Historian
Brewminate
Reform Meets the Reality of Power
Democratic leaders are pushing back against growing calls to rein in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as concern over the agency’s scope, conduct, and accountability continues to intensify. The resistance is striking not because it comes from political opponents of reform, but because it emerges from within the party most closely associated with promises of oversight, restraint, and institutional accountability. What is unfolding is not a sudden ideological reversal. It is a familiar moment in American political history, one where reform rhetoric collides with the gravitational pull of state power.
This collision exposes a persistent tension that transcends party labels. Political movements may campaign on change, but once institutions of enforcement are fully embedded, shrinking them becomes far more difficult than condemning their excesses. Budgets, not speeches, reveal where power is ultimately protected. Time and again, leaders who acknowledge systemic problems nonetheless preserve the machinery that sustains them, often invoking pragmatism, stability, or electoral risk. The language of reform survives, but the architecture of enforcement remains intact.
History suggests this is not an anomaly but a pattern. Enforcement agencies, once normalized, acquire a political inertia that resists contraction even under governments nominally committed to reform. The refusal to rein in ICE spending should therefore be understood less as a discrete policy dispute and more as a test of whether reformist politics can withstand the institutional realities of coercive power. The outcome of such tests has rarely favored restraint.
Guardrails, Not Retrenchment
At issue is not whether ICE should exist, but whether its scale and funding should be meaningfully constrained. Progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups have renewed calls to rein in ICE spending, arguing that budgetary growth has outpaced oversight and entrenched practices that successive administrations have criticized but failed to reverse. In response, prominent Democratic leaders have rejected proposals that would significantly reduce funding or impose strict fiscal limits, signaling reluctance to alter the agency’s material footprint.
The justifications offered are framed in familiar terms. Party leaders point to border management responsibilities, operational continuity, and the political risks of appearing weak on enforcement. Some argue that oversight and reform can proceed without cutting budgets, while others emphasize the complexity of immigration policy under divided government and an increasingly volatile electoral landscape. The emphasis is on moderation and manageability, not transformation.
What is notably absent from these responses is any serious willingness to use fiscal restraint as a lever of reform. Oversight without budgetary consequences leaves enforcement capacity largely untouched. In practical terms, this position preserves the status quo while acknowledging its flaws. The disagreement, then, is not over whether ICE has been controversial, but over whether reform should ever require contraction rather than accommodation.
Historical Precedent: Liberal Complicity in Expanding State Enforcement
American history offers repeated examples of reform-minded political coalitions presiding over the expansion rather than the contraction of enforcement power. These moments are rarely remembered as acts of endorsement. They are framed instead as reluctant accommodations to crisis, necessity, or political reality. Yet the result is the same. Agencies created or enlarged under extraordinary circumstances tend to persist long after the urgency that justified them has faded.
The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 provide one of the earliest and clearest illustrations. Conducted in the name of national security during a period of labor unrest and fear of radicalism, the raids dramatically expanded federal policing authority. Liberal and progressive figures who otherwise championed civil liberties supported or tolerated these measures as temporary responses to instability. Once the machinery of enforcement was set in motion, however, it proved difficult to dismantle. What began as an emergency response helped normalize a permanent federal role in domestic surveillance and repression.
A similar pattern reappeared during the Cold War. Internal security programs, loyalty investigations, and expansive intelligence operations were not solely the products of conservative ideology. Liberal administrations frequently defended them as unfortunate necessities in an existential struggle. Civil liberties were rhetorically valued yet routinely subordinated to enforcement structures whose budgets and authority continued to grow. When abuses became undeniable, reform followed slowly and incompletely, constrained by institutions that had already entrenched themselves.
The War on Drugs extended this logic into the late twentieth century. Despite mounting evidence of racialized enforcement, mass incarceration, and limited public safety benefits, successive administrations across the political spectrum expanded funding for policing and drug enforcement. Reformist language coexisted with fiscal growth. Few leaders were willing to risk the political consequences of contraction, even as the social costs became impossible to ignore. The resulting system proved remarkably resilient to later calls for change.
The lesson is consistent. Enforcement institutions do not expand because reformers abandon their principles, but because the structure of power rewards preservation over restraint. Budgets become shields. Oversight becomes symbolic. History suggests that when liberal governance encounters entrenched coercive institutions, the impulse to manage and moderate them often eclipses the will to reduce them.
Pattern Analysis: Why Enforcement Agencies Are Hard to Shrink
Once enforcement agencies reach a certain scale, they begin to operate according on logic largely independent of the political coalitions that oversee them. Bureaucratic self-preservation is not merely instinctive but structural. Agencies develop internal cultures, professional identities, and incentive systems oriented toward growth and continuity. Budgets fund not only operations but careers, contracts, and constituencies, all of which acquire a stake in the agency’s survival.
Political risk compounds this inertia. Expanding or maintaining enforcement capacity is almost always safer than reducing it. Leaders face asymmetric consequences. Being accused of weakness carries immediate electoral danger, while restraint offers little visible reward. Success is difficult to prove, while failure is easily dramatized. In this environment, preservation becomes the default choice, even among those who acknowledge systemic problems.
Moral outsourcing further reinforces this pattern. Elected officials often express concern about abuses while delegating responsibility to oversight committees, inspectors general, or future reforms. Accountability is framed as a procedural matter rather than a structural one. This allows leaders to signal ethical awareness without confronting the material foundations of power. The agency continues to operate at full capacity, buffered by assurances that reform is underway.
History also shows that enforcement institutions benefit from the language of inevitability. Complexity is invoked to discourage decisive action. Problems are described as too entrenched, too technical, or too politically sensitive to address directly. Over time, what began as caution hardens into consensus. Contraction is redefined as unrealistic, while preservation is presented as responsible governance.
These forces explain why enforcement agencies so often survive waves of criticism intact. Reform becomes incremental, symbolic, or deferred. Budgets remain largely untouched, and with them the capacity to exert coercive power. The difficulty is not a lack of historical awareness, but the enduring reality that power, once institutionalized, resists voluntary surrender.
The ICE Parallel: Reform without Retrenchment
ICE operated with a significantly increased budget for Fiscal Year 2025 due to new legislation. While its typical annual budget is around $9-10 billion, a recent bill has nearly tripled its funding to approximately $28.7 billion for the current fiscal year.
The current debate over ICE funding fits squarely within this historical pattern. Democratic leaders acknowledge concerns about the agency’s practices and public legitimacy yet resist proposals that would meaningfully reduce its resources. The emphasis remains on management rather than reduction, on refinement rather than rollback. In effect, the agency’s scope is treated as a given, even as its outcomes are questioned.
This approach reflects a familiar compromise. Reform is framed as compatible with continued expansion, or at least with the preservation of existing capacity. Oversight mechanisms are emphasized, task forces proposed, internal reviews promised. What is conspicuously avoided is the use of the budget as a corrective tool. Without fiscal consequences, reform remains procedural, not structural.
The result is a policy posture that condemns excess while sustaining capability. ICE is criticized in language but reinforced in practice. Funding levels communicate continuity more clearly than statements of concern. As in earlier episodes of enforcement expansion, the political center gravitates toward stability, even when stability means perpetuating systems widely regarded as flawed.
Seen through a historical lens, this is not an aberration but an inheritance. Reformist coalitions often discover that the hardest institutions to change are those that wield coercive authority in the name of security. The ICE debate reveals how easily reform becomes accommodation when retrenchment is treated as politically untenable.
Implications: What History Suggests Comes Next
History offers a sobering guide to what follows when enforcement agencies are preserved in moments of controversy rather than curtailed. Institutions that survive periods of intense criticism rarely emerge diminished. More often, they adapt rhetorically while maintaining or expanding their operational reach. The language surrounding them shifts, but their budgets and authorities remain largely intact, allowing contested practices to persist under new justifications.
When reform is decoupled from retrenchment, accountability tends to drift. Oversight mechanisms multiply, reports are issued, and internal rules are revised, yet the underlying capacity for coercion remains unchanged. This pattern has repeatedly produced cycles in which abuses are acknowledged after the fact, followed by incremental reforms that leave the core structure untouched. History suggests that meaningful change becomes harder, not easier, as time passes and institutional memory normalizes prior controversies.
Another recurring consequence is the gradual expansion of mandate. Agencies preserved for narrow purposes often find those purposes broadened in response to new pressures. What begins as an exception hardens into routine practice. Without deliberate limits, enforcement institutions tend to redefine necessity in ways that justify continued growth, especially when political leaders are reluctant to impose clear boundaries.
The implication is not inevitability, but probability. History does not dictate outcomes, yet it reveals patterns of behavior that recur with striking consistency. When leaders decline to use fiscal restraint as a tool of reform, they signal that preservation outweighs transformation. Past experience suggests that such choices shape the future more decisively than rhetoric, setting conditions that later reforms must struggle to undo.
Power Is Revealed in Budgets
Throughout American history, the true measure of reform has not been found in language, intentions, or symbolic gestures, but in budgets. Funding decisions reveal what leaders are ultimately willing to preserve. When enforcement agencies continue to receive robust financial support amid widespread criticism, the message is clear. Concern may be genuine, but restraint is negotiable. Power is acknowledged, yet left materially intact.
The debate over ICE spending underscores this enduring truth. Oversight without fiscal consequence has rarely produced structural change. History shows that institutions tasked with coercive authority do not shrink through caution or rhetorical discomfort alone. They contract only when political leaders are willing to accept the risks of limiting them. Absent that willingness, reform remains managerial, not transformative.
The question, then, is not whether reformist politics can recognize the dangers of unchecked enforcement. It plainly can. The harder question is whether it can act on that recognition when budgets are at stake. History suggests that this is where reform most often falters. In that tension between acknowledgment and action, the contours of power are quietly, but decisively, drawn.
Originally published by Brewminate, 01.13.2026, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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