No, Congress Didn’t Give Up Its Spending Power
Spinelessness isn't permanent.
As regulars know, I’m a big fan of the NYT podcast The Daily. However, today’s episode, “Congress Just Gave Away Spending Power to Trump,” was just . . . bizarre. The premise:
President Trump has achieved a major victory: persuading both chambers of Congress to cancel billions of dollars in spending that they had already approved.
In the process, the Republican-led Congress is giving Mr. Trump the power that it, and it alone, is supposed to have.
It features NYT congressional correspondent Catie Edmondson and is based on her report, “Congress Agrees to Claw Back Foreign Aid and Public Broadcast Funds.”
Congress approved a White House request to claw back $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting, after Republicans bowed to President Trump in an unusual surrender of congressional spending power.
The House’s 216-to-213 vote early Friday morning sent the package to Mr. Trump for his signature. Two Republicans, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Michael R. Turner of Ohio, opposed the measure.
The Senate approved the package in a predawn 51-to-48 vote the day before, overcoming the objections of two Republicans, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who argued that their party was ceding Congress’s constitutional control over federal funding.
The bulk of the funds targeted — about $8 billion — was for foreign assistance programs. The remaining $1.1 billion was for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which finances NPR and PBS.
The debate on the measure laid bare a simmering fight over Congress’s power of the purse. Since Mr. Trump began his second term, the White House has moved aggressively and at times unilaterally, primarily through the Department of Government Efficiency, to expand the executive branch’s control over federal spending, a power the Constitution gives to the legislative branch.
Top White House officials, led by Russell T. Vought, the budget office director, have sought to rein in the size of the federal government, including by freezing funds appropriated by Congress. It is part of a wider campaign to claim far-reaching powers over federal spending for the president.
This time, the administration went through a formal process by submitting what is known as a rescissions bill. Those measures are rare and seldom succeed, given how tightly Congress has historically guarded its power over federal spending. The last such package to be enacted was in 1999, under President Bill Clinton.
I fully agree that Congress has frequently ceded its power to the President over the years. This has especially been true under the current administration, which has refused to spend money appropriated by Congress and even shuttered entired agencies created by and funded by Congress.
But this particular episode is not such an instance. Here, the President requested that Congress pass a bill and . . . Congress passed the bill. That’s how things are supposed to work. Congress didn’t give up its power over spending; it exercised it.
To be sure, the fact that Congressional Republicans spinelessly go along with whatever President Trump wants is problematic. But that’s a function of their cowardice and his perceived clout with the base, not the institutional power of Congress. A majority-Democratic Congress—even in just one House—wouldn’t have passed this.
I saw some reporting a week or so ago that the foreign aid cuts included funding for UNICEF. But since then I have seen no specifics on what foreign aid is being cut. Although I am an NPR fan (and contributor), I think the moral bankruptcy and strategic retreat of cutting foreign aid perhaps should be the bigger headline.
While I don’t like the recession package, I concur: this was a legitimate process.
But, it seems worth noting, that letting DOGE wood-chip USAID was Congress sitting by and letting the President ignore its powers. Ditto letting him gut the DOE. Those are just two examples.
My understanding is that this was Congress giving up its power of the purse retroactively in order to avoid its own governing rules and fast-track a Congressional stamp for Trump’s illegal activity.
Trump et al impounded almost all of these funds starting in March or April. That would be legal (by statute) if he also asked for them to be rescinded, which must be acted on within 45 days – these requests follow a different path and have different debate and voting rules. No request was made until June, 2 months after the impoundment began. So either the Administration was violating US statutes for months or the impoundment marked the start of the rescission request. There’s no way to split that.
If you don’t want the Administration to have violated the Impoundment Act, this legislation comes 2 months after the 45-day window, so it should never have been considered a “rescission request”. But Congress claimed it was, and that it fell in the 45-day window, even though that means the Impoundment Act must have been violated for months leading up to it.
That’s why this is an abrogation of the “power of the purse”. It’s not that they aren’t allowed to remove the funding, it’s that in doing so they have validated Trump (once again) violating the law and stealing power specifically reserved for Congress for those several prior months. And they did it so they could use the Impoundment Act’s rescission rules to avoid debate.
“Spinelessness isn’t permanent.”
Show your work, please.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Impeachment doesn’t work, and the courts are creating a lot of new precedent to allow the executive to act unilaterally (at least until it is too late), so I don’t see how Congress gets this power back.
With a lot of the things the Trump administration is doing, I think we have to be thinking more on how to rebuild something stronger, rather than restore the weak thing that was there — democracy, bounds on the president’s powers, etc. What that looks like as a practical matter — I have no idea.
I think that political power tends to become concentrated with time. The founders of our country knew that and tried to write in a bunch of institutional checks and balances. These controls have eroded. I’m not sure where we should mark the first big change, Jackson defying the Supreme Court or Lincoln limiting habeas corpus. Every President since then has pushed his power. Trump has knocked down lots of previous limits especially in the area of personal emoluments. No subsequent President will reverse this trend. That’s the way things work. MAGA, nonMAGA conservatives, Dems, Leftists, the whole spectrum will push to centralize power.