The US congress is so broken that it seems like a majority of laws are railroaded into bills that absolutely need to pass rather than seperate bills themselves.
Both parties say "we'll pass this spending bill if you let x, y, and z completely unrelated bills be attached to it." Then both sides can say "we got this bill you wanted passed" and "I didn't want to vote for X but I had to support the budget bill."
Tangentially related, the Helms Amendment is but one example of leveraging the dispersal of funds.
I've not looked into the specifics here but it wouldn't be out of place to tie aspects of budget funding to the existence of a questionable security risk being present in a government assisted environment.
If you throw the lever, the trolley won’t run over the livelihoods of thousands of federal employees, but all kinds of sneaky unfavorable things may happen.
Kind of funny, but the last guy who looked at me like I was an idiot for asking for a detailed list of what actions should be performed to "whitelist" something had never had to implement one himself.
Each agency, bureau, department, school, and institution would not just have to have IT people to implement the whitelists (eg- in mdm or by policy, which they may not already use), but get people to serve on committees to approve, build, and maintain the whitelists, create the processes to field and test all whitelisting requests, create a process exception request process, and coordinate with whatever external governing or regulatory bodies' lists to ensure compliance.
It wouldn't take long before the employees would just start using their personal devices and hotspots for everything to avoid the hassle, which would be so much worse.
Both parties say "we'll pass this spending bill if you let x, y, and z completely unrelated bills be attached to it." Then both sides can say "we got this bill you wanted passed" and "I didn't want to vote for X but I had to support the budget bill."
It's a ridiculous system.