The D Brief: Shutdown watch; Lingering defense-strategy qs; JAGs’ unusual new jobs; Secret drone’s recent mission; And a bit more.

The U.S. may be headed for another government shutdown. Lawmakers are tussling over terms to keep the government open ahead of a funding deadline this evening at midnight. A bipartisan deal had been reached Thursday afternoon after the White House and Senate Democrats announced an agreement to separate Homeland Security funds from a five-bill package the full Senate could take up on Friday. 

“Republicans and Democrats in Congress have come together to get the vast majority of the Government funded until September, while at the same time providing an extension to the Department of Homeland Security,” President Trump said on social media just after 6 p.m. ET.

But shortly before midnight, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., torpedoed the compromise because it would repeal a provision allowing lawmakers like Graham to sue for $500,000 if their phone records were collected as part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s probe into interference in the 2020 general election. He also told reporters he didn’t want DHS funded only through Feb. 13, as the compromise plan instructed, while bipartisan negotiations continued over possible reforms affecting immigration agents—including “an end to roving patrols, a ban on face masks and a requirement to wear body cameras,” Reuters reports. 

Senate leader John Thune’s forecast: “Tomorrow’s another day and hopefully people will be in a spirit to try to get this done,” he said as he left the Capitol Thursday night, according to The Hill. Senators are expected to return beginning at 11 a.m. ET. “Hopefully by sometime tomorrow we’ll be in a better spot,” Thune said. 

Another hiccup: House Speaker Mike Johnson said his chamber won’t act any earlier than Monday, which he said Thursday night means, “We may inevitably be in a short shutdown situation,” the New York Times reports. 

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1933, Adolf Hitler took office as the Chancellor of Germany.

Deportation nation

Dozens of military lawyers have been temporarily assigned as federal prosecutors to support law-enforcement surges in Minneapolis and other cities, Defense One’s Tom Novelly reported Thursday. 

This month alone, the Justice Department requested about 40 lawyers, a U.S. official said. It’s a novel arrangement that’s stretching an overworked judge advocate general corps and drawing concern from legal experts. 

Expert reax: “The government has used JAGs to help prosecute offenses unrelated to military bases in a handful of cases over the years, but we've never seen JAGs used at this scale in civilian criminal cases with no military connection,” said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. “Not only does the scale raise serious concerns about taking JAGs away from their regular duties, but it also raises the question of why the Department of Justice is having so much trouble trying these cases itself.”

Second opinion: Steven Lepper, a retired Air Force judge advocate general, said he has serious doubts about the administration's new use of the military lawyers. “The fact that there is no military nexus here between the kinds of cases that JAGs serving as special assistant U.S. attorneys are going to help prosecute essentially puts these JAGs in a role where the fundamental question ought to be whether doing that is a violation of Posse Comitatus,” he said. Continue reading, here. 

Nationwide protests and walkouts are planned Friday in 46 states across the country in response to the deaths of American citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good at the hands of immigration agents in Minneapolis this month. The plans come on the heels of “last Friday's protests when thousands marched through Minneapolis in the bitter cold, urging an end to President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown in their city,” Reuters reported Friday from Minneapolis. 

Panning out: “After weeks of videos showing aggressive tactics by heavily armed and masked officers in Minneapolis, American approval of Trump's immigration policy has fallen to its lowest in his second term,” the wire service writes. 

Footage circulated Thursday of a woman in Minnesota who walked outside to warm the car for her kids and was abducted by federal agents. The video shows her calling someone on the phone to look after her children, who were left alone in the house.

Meanwhile in D.C., police arrested 54 religious demonstrators who sat inside the Hart Senate Office Building as several held banners that read “Do Justice, Love kindness, Abolish ICE.”

The view from Minnesota: “It’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens,” Gov. Tim Walz said in an interview with The Atlantic this week. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” Walz asked, referring to the South Carolina fort where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861.

Some Americans have observed that unrest today echoes the tumultuous 1960s, which saw several assassinations—including President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, Malcomb X and Martin Luther King Jr. Those observers point to the attempted assasination of Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and two Democratic lawmakers from Minnesota last year, as well as the two Americans killed in Minneapolis this month. Other historians have pointed to Germany in 1933 with the rise of police state tactics and concentration camps. And still others have pointed to a time when congressional decorum and gridlock was far worse than it is today: America in the 1850s, after congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which tackled an overhyped problem and targeted northern sanctuary cities and helped collapse the country and ignite a civil war in 1861, as Walz mentioned. 

Trump’s deportation raids have inspired at least two protest songs in America: “Join ICE,” by Jesse Welles, and “Streets of Minneapolis,” by Bruce Springstein, which was released this week after the deaths of Pretti and Good. Shock over their deaths has reached as far as the Danish island of Greenland, where some residents who said they were warm to the idea of becoming a U.S. territory under Trump now said they’ve changed their mind, the New York Times reported Thursday. 

On social media Thursday night, Trump called Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” after footage was posted online Wednesday showing Pretti spit at an agent and kick the tail light off of a government vehicle on Jan. 13. The agents then exited their vehicle and tackled him to the ground, breaking one of his ribs. The incident occurred a week and a half before DHS agents tackled and disarmed him before shooting him to death on Saturday. 

Related reading: 

• “U.S. cardinal urges defunding of ICE: 'We need to see what's happening in front of us',” PBS News reported Wednesday;
• And “Trump reshapes US historical and cultural institutions,” Reuters reported Friday, citing changes across museums, monuments and national parks. 

Around the Defense Department

A secretive Air Force spy drone was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture Venezuela’s leader earlier this month, Lockheed Martin’s CEO confirmed, marking a rare disclosure of the aircraft’s operations, Defense One’s Tom Novelly reported Thursday. 

James Taiclet confirmed that RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drones were part of the Jan. 3 Venezuelan mission, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, on a Thursday earnings call. “Lockheed Martin products once again proved critical to the U.S. military's most demanding missions,” Taiclet said. “The recent Operation Absolute Resolve included F-35 and F-22 fighter jets, RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drones, and Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters, which helped ensure mission success while bringing the men and women of our armed forces home safely.”

Taiclet’s mention of the spy drone is the first disclosure of the aircraft’s operations in roughly half a decade. In 2021, the 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada briefly mentioned the unit had “successfully deployed and redeployed RQ-170 Sentinel forces” in a news release. While the use of the surveillance drone in the Venezuela operations was not surprising to some Air Force analysts, one expert said the disclosure of the mission from Lockheed Martin was abnormal. Read on, here. 

And lastly this week: Experts have questions about the White House’s new National Defense Strategy, including whether there’s an implementation plan to go with it, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday. 

One consideration: While there are always some tensions or contradictions in an NDS, because they’re written by a group of people, this latest document seems to go in several directions at the same time, said Becca Wasser, a CNAS adjunct senior fellow. 

The thesis of the NDS is that the rules-based international order was a far-fetched fantasy. It’s a favored worldview of Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief and key NDS author, Myers reports.  

The strategy proposes to replace that framework with what the Trump administration has coined the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: “American military dominance” in the Western Hemisphere that denies “adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities” there.

“What is interesting about that, though, is that, of course, it doesn't say much about what this is,” said Dustin Walker, policy director at Anduril. “What is replacing that order, what are the sort of higher-order strategic objectives that we are pursuing here?” He added, “You don't really hear much about sort of procurement priorities. I think Golden Dome is literally the only specific capability area mentioned in the document. So you don't have a lot of guidance for force design and development here. There's no description of the budget or sort of investment profile that's going to be required to do this.”

Second opinion: The document may not even be “worth the paper it's written on because the president’s going to do whatever he wants and he's not going to even try to adhere to it, which might be why it was released with such little fanfare,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a CNAS senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, which hosted a Wednesday discussion on the strategy. Continue reading, here.