As the government shutdown drags on—in no small part because President Donald Trump is desperate to hide his connections to Jeffrey Epstein—he is now picking and choosing who gets paid.

Unsurprisingly, it’s exactly who you would think. Active-duty military? Check. Air marshals? Check. FBI agents? Check. ICE agents? Check. 

You get the point. 

Because we no longer have any meaningful insight into the workings of government, it’s tough to figure out exactly how many people are drawing paychecks, but it’s not a small amount. 

There are around 1.3 million active-duty military members. And according to the Washington Post, there are about 70,000 people between the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security who are also getting paid, presumably including FBI, ICE, and Border Patrol personnel. 

Basically, if a federal employee is fascist or fascist-adjacent, they’re getting paid.

As for the people who make sure that those employees get their paychecks? They’re not getting paid at all.

“We are called support staff, but I’d argue that we drive them. Just because they have a gun, badge, and authority doesn’t make them more important than us,” one ICE staffer told the Post. “It shows that the administration only cares about the gun holders.”

Well, yes. 

Meanwhile, The New York Times, in case you were wondering, is not meeting the moment on this one. Instead, it’s framing the Trump administration’s completely illegal diversion of government money to pay fascists as a “budgetary twister,” and that Trump is “stretching the limits” of his authority. 

The Times also claims that Trump is “reprogramming” dollars allocated by Congress, but that is not a thing. Trump can’t use the government shutdown as an excuse to allocate government funding to whatever he wants and nothing else. But given that the Times called it “expanding his authority to spend federal money” a couple of weeks ago, this tracks.

As the shutdown enters its third week, federal workers are lining up at food banks as they try to keep their heads above water while not getting paid. That’s about 1.4 million people.

And all of this is happening while Trump demands the government to give him $230 million because being investigated for his myriad crimes and impeachment-worthy offenses made him sad.

He’s also literally tearing down the White House so he can build a monstrous ballroom, which is supposedly paid for by shadowy private donors who are lining up to bribe the president in exchange for personal favors.

Congress could stop Trump from diverting money to favored employees tomorrow, but the Republicans in control have no interest in doing so. And the Supreme Court has had ample opportunity to rule against Trump’s efforts to treat the government and taxpayer dollars as his personal playthings. 

But like so many things in Trump’s second term, the shutdown has highlighted that checks and balances aren’t magically self-executing. There are no rules, just norms to be completely ignored.