Trump plans an
audacious grab for congressional ‘power of the purse’
He would trample what
the Founders intended.
January
17, 2025 at 11:55 a.m. ESTToday at 11:55 a.m. EST
As a presidential candidate last year, Donald Trump declared
that if California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) did not divert more of the state’s
limited water supply to farmers, “we won’t give him money to put out all his
fires. And if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got
problems.”
This is the cudgel of a monarch or heartless despot, which
is precisely why the Founders of this country invested the people’s
representatives in Congress — not the president — with the “power of the purse.”
The Constitution stipulates that money coming from the federal treasury has to
have been appropriated by the legislative branch, starting with the House, in
laws directing how those funds must be spent.
On the flip side, it is illegal for a president to
unilaterally withhold or needlessly delay disbursement of federal money once it
has been approved by Congress and signed into law. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was one of the most important of the post-Watergate
reforms, passed after skirmishes in which then-president Richard M. Nixon put
his signature on appropriations bills and then “impounded” — refused to spend —
money that had been allocated to programs that he opposed.
A half-century later, that will again become a flash point
in the second Trump administration. The incoming president and his team are
positioning to vastly expand the dominance of the executive branch; Trump’s
dubious claims to impoundment authority will be a key lever in achieving it.
“I am hard-pressed to think of what would be a more
substantial shift of power from the Congress to the president,” University of
Maryland public policy professor Philip Joyce,
a leading expert on the use of federal budget authority, told me.
Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020 came about because
he stalled $214 million in military assistance for Ukraine that had been
overwhelmingly approved by Congress, so he could pressure Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up incriminating evidence about the Biden family. The
nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency that reports to
Congress, found that the White House violated the law.
Trump’s intended nominee for a second stint as head of the
Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, reiterated at his confirmation
hearing Wednesday his and Trump’s claim that a president has the constitutional
authority to impound money — though courts have ruled otherwise.
Vought also refused to commit to spending $3.8 billion that
has been enacted for security assistance to Ukraine, telling the Senate
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs he would not “get ahead
of the president on a foreign policy issue.”
Trump campaigned on an explicit promise to “choke off the
money” that Congress has appropriated and press for the repeal of the
Impoundment Control Act. He portrays these actions as means of trimming
wasteful spending, though experience suggests he plans to use them to get his
political adversaries to bend to his will — with brazenly partisan use of
emergency aid being a case in point.
Last year, Politico’s E&E News reported that during Trump’s first term, he had “on at least
three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered
politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.”
The article quoted Mark Harvey, who had been Trump’s senior
director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, as
saying that after wildfires hit California in 2018, Trump was persuaded to
release assistance only after being shown how many votes he had gotten in the
impacted areas.
Trump is the latest in “a succession of presidents who have
been increasingly high-handed in their assertions of executive power,”
said Douglas Elmendorf,
a former dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who headed
the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 to 2015.
At the same time, Congress has grown more supine over the
years in resisting these end-runs by Democratic and Republican presidents. The
MAGA-fied House of Representatives can be expected to accelerate the trend.
Already, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), echoing Trump, has said “there should probably be conditions” placed on federal money that is sent to fire-ravaged
California, because “state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in
many respects.”
All of this comes as Trump and his allies are spreading false information about the causes of the current wildfire spread — for
instance, claiming that Southern California lacks water because of poor policy
decisions, when actually its state-run reservoirs are full. It should also be
noted that no strings were attached to the aid that Congress recently provided
to red states ravaged by hurricanes.
As Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat from Southern
California, put it: “When this happens in Florida again — which it will happen;
when it happens in the Carolinas; when it happens with tornadoes in Oklahoma or
other places, we are going to provide them the aid that they need, because that
is what Americans do.”
The appalling politicization of tragedy is just one sign of
what lies ahead.
As James Madison wrote:
“This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and
effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate
representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and
for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
Step up, Congress members. Make yourselves worthy of
the trust the Founders placed in you.
