Around 2 a.m. ET on Thursday morning, Senate Republicans approved Donald Trump’s rescissions package, clawing back roughly $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund local public television and radio stations around the country, and roughly $8 billion from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Nearly 24 hours later, House Republicans, also voting in the middle of the night, followed suit.

The bill — a breathtaking example of GOP lawmakers ceding their authority to the White House at the president’s insistence — now heads to the White House for Trump’s signature.

The consequences for communities around the world that rely on USAID resources, as well as Americans who depend on public broadcasting, are likely to be dramatic. But this is also poised to do lasting harm to how Congress works.

For generations, Democrats and Republicans have advanced spending deals through bipartisan negotiations and compromises in which both parties end up with some of what they want. But if we’re entering an era in which presidents can decide to reject certain congressionally approved investments, and a narrow congressional majority can endorse such efforts after the fact, then members — especially those in the minority — have no reason to even try to reach bipartisan deals, since they’ll have no guarantees that the money will actually be spent.

Sen. Chris Murphy tried to explain this to his Republican colleagues during a debate on the Senate floor. “It will become hard, maybe even impossible, to write a bipartisan budget ever again, because the minority party knows they can get double crossed,” the Connecticut Democrat said.

Around the same time, a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, “Why would any Democrat vote for a bipartisan spending bill if Republicans can turn around and claw back the money the next day?” She barely even tried to answer, referring to funding for USAID and public broadcasting as “crap,” before moving on.

One of Leavitt’s powerful colleagues went much further. Politico reported:

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought isn’t interested in giving assurances to lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the White House will abide by any bipartisan spending agreements made this year. ‘The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan,’ Vought told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Thursday.

Leavitt told reporters that the White House budget director was endorsing more bipartisanship, which is precisely the opposite of what Vought actually said — twice.

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In case this weren’t quite enough, HuffPost reported, “President Donald Trump’s budget chief suggested Thursday that he doesn’t need Congress or the Constitution to force through massive cuts to federal spending, hinting that more such cuts are coming soon as Trump demonstrates he’s ‘not cowing to a legislative branch’s understanding of its own authorities and powers.’”

Vought, in other words, sketched out a vision in which Trump can seize control over the power of the purge from Congress, constitutional law be damned.

For those concerned about the White House’s shift toward authoritarianism, the budget director’s comments rang all kinds of alarms, but in the short term, it’s also worth emphasizing that Team Trump is making government shutdowns far more likely.

This isn’t complicated: Passing spending bills that keep the government’s lights on tends to require bipartisan votes. It’s against this backdrop that the White House has effectively told Democrats, “We’re going to keep undoing spending the president doesn’t like; we want less bipartisanship; and we’re largely indifferent to Congress’ existence.”

Bipartisan negotiations on spending packages were difficult before. They’re vastly harder now.