After the White House called for billions of dollars in funding reductions, senators and representatives are rescinding the proposed cuts and even boosting funds for basic research.

The president and his aides can lie to Congress with impunity, he argued, because the Republicans who run the House and Senate have shown they will do nothing about it. “This is the weakest Congress in American history,” Moulton said, accusing Republican leaders of making a co-equal branch of the federal government “essentially fade away.”