THE REALLY BIG FIGHT WILL COME WHEN TRUMP TRIES TO SEIZE THE POWER OF THE PURSE

Since the English Barons met with King John at Runnymede in 1215 and forced him to sign the Magna Carta, the Power of the Purse, and who shall wield it, has been a central point of political contention in the development of democratic constitutional republics.

In the United States, the Power of the Purse resides in the House of Representatives, that part of the national government closest to the citizen voters.

The last president to challenge the power of the House of Representatives to set financial goals and provide for the proper financing of the agencies of governmnt to achieve those goals was Richard Nixon, 50 years ago.

Donald Trump is preparing to enter his second term as president and has vowed to cut a vast array of government services and announced a radical plan to do so.

Rather than rely on his party’s control of both houses of congress to trim the budget, Trump and his advisers have stated their intent to test an obscure legal theory that holds presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike. This was also the heart of Nixon’s chosen battleground in the early 1970s, when Congress began defunding the operation of the war in Vietnam.

In a 2023 campaign video, Trump said: “We can simply choke off the money. For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending.” As with most everything Trump says about politics and government, this is another lie.

The plan, known as “impoundment,” threatens to provoke a major clash with the Article II p[ower over the limits of the president’s Article I control over the budget.

The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to appropriate the federal budget. The role of the Article I executive branch is to dole out the money effectively, in accordance with the budget created and approved by Congress. That power was affirmed in by passage of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, whch wrote into law that the president did not possess such authority.

Trump and his advisers assert that a president can unilaterally ignore the Congress’ spending decisions and “impound” funds if he opposes them or deems them wasteful.

This assault on the congessional power of the purse is part of his larger plan to consolidate as much power in the executive branch as possible. Earlier this month, he attempted to pressure the Senate to voluntarily go into recess for longer than ten days, so he could appoint his cabinet through recess appointments, avoiding the Senate’s role in advise and consent to such appointments. So far, he was forced to back down on this demand when it became clear that at least five Republican Senators would vote against Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General.

Trump’s claim to possess impoundment power stands against that law. If Trump were to assert and maintain a power to kill congressionally approved programs, it would tee up a fight in the federal courts and - accoprding to experts - fundamentally alter Congress’ bedrock power of he purse were he to prevail at the Supreme Court. Given the present court’s demonstrated willingness to ignore precedent, it is not clear how they would rule, despite the several Supreme Court rulings against Nixon’s attempted usurpation 50 years ago.

The possible fight was teed up in an op-ed published Wednesday by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has placved in control of the new nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency - who do not possess between the two of them knowledge of the actual operation of government under the Constitution that would fill a thimble - in which they said they planned to slash federal spending and fire civil servants. Since DOGE is about as real as the Doge Coins our Unreconstructed Afrikaner Space Nazi plays with, the fact is that what these two fuckwits have the power to do is t o make suggestions and recommendations to Congress, which has the power to kill a program or agency and reset the terms of employment for the federal employees involved.

Musk and Ramaswamy wrote, “We believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.” They could be right.

Their efforts could offer Trump his first Supreme Court test of the post-Watergate Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which requires the president to spend the money Congress approves. The law allows exceptions, such as when the executive branch can achieve Congress’ goals by spending less, but not as a means for the president to kill programs he opposes.

Trump and his fellow conspirators have been telegraphing his plan for a hostile takeover of the budgeting process for months. He has decried the 1974 law as “not a very good act” in his campaign video and said, “Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State.”

The once-obscure impoundment debate has come back into vogue in MAGA circles thanks to Russell Vought, Trump’s former and future budget director, and Mark Paoletta, who served under Vought during Trump 1.0 as the OMB general counsel, who have worked to popularize the idea after it was brought up by the Vought-founded Center for Renewing America.

In private remarks to a gathering of MAGA luminaries uncovered by ProPublica, Vought boasted he was assembling a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel so that Trump is armed on day one with the legal rationalizations to realize his agenda, saying, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”

The prospect of Trump seizing vast control over federal spending is not merely about reducing the size of the federal government, a long-standing conservative goal. It is also fueling new fears about his promises of vengeance.

A similar attempted power grab led to his first impeachment, when he held up nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine while he pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and his family. The U.S. Government Accountability Office later ruled his actions violated the Impoundment Control Act.

Trump tested other ways to withhold federal funding as a means to punish his perceived enemies. After devastating wildfires in California and Washington in 2018, Trump delayed or refused to sign disaster declarations that would have provided federal disaster relief aid because neither state had voted for him, on which he only relented when aides pointed out to him on maps that the people harmed by the fires had in fact voted for him. He also targeted “sanctuary cities,” conditioning federal grants on local law enforcement’s willingness to cooperate with mass deportation efforts, a policy he has already said he intends to bring back.

Trump and his conspirators claim there is a long presidential history of impoundment dating back to Thomas Jefferson.

In that case, Jefferson decided not to spend money Congress had appropriated for gun boats - a decision the law, which appropriated money for “a number not exceeding fifteen gun boats” using “a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars,” authorized him to make.

In 1972, following his landslide relection victory(which really was a landslide, unlike 2024), Nixon took impoundment to a new extreme, gutting billions of dollars from programs he simply opposed, such as highway improvements, water treatment, drug rehabilitation and disaster relief for farmers. There was overwhelming pushback both from Congress and the courts. More than a half dozen federal judges and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled the appropriations bills at issue did not give Nixon the flexibility to cut individual programs.

Vought and his allies argue the Congress limits put into law in 1974 are unconstitutional, citing a clause in the Constitution that obligates the president to “faithfully execute” the law and holding that it also implies his power to forbid such enforcement. Trump has been fond of describing this clause as giving him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The Supreme Court has never directly weighed in on whether impoundment is constitutional. But it cast doubt on Trump’s reasoning in an 1838 case, Kendall v. U.S., about a federal debt payment, stating: “To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible.”

Nixon’s Justice Department made the same argument th Court did in Kendall. William Rehnquist, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in 1969: “With respect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds, we must conclude that existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.”

Trump is bound and determined to make this fight, supported by his “Richelieu,” Russell Vought, who believes we are now in a “post constitutional” era. Given the history of the current court, it is anyone’s guess at this point how such a fight will play out.

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