The problem with this charitable interpretation is that Trump does, quite literally, plan to seize powers that our Constitution does not afford to presidents. He’s been laying down the groundwork to do so, including lately through the federal budget process.
In recent months, Trump has said explicitly that sometimes he won’t spend money the way Congress — which controls power of the purse, per the Constitution — instructs him to. He and his advisers have described plans to use “impoundment,” a technical term meaning to withhold funds that Congress has appropriated for specific purposes.
“Restoring the Impoundment Power,” Trump’s campaign website says, will help “stop unnecessary spending” and “crush the Deep State.” Perhaps those sound like reasonable outcomes to fans of small government — who could object to a bit of penny-pinching here and there?
What it would mean in practice, though, is more troubling: Trump could unilaterally zero out any program he doesn’t like, or whose recipient has angered him, regardless of Congress’s instructions.
Based on comments the candidate and his aides have made recently, Trump’s targets for budgetary nuking include clean-energy subsidies, international aid programs and funding for the World Health Organization. He told Fox News last week that he might cut the entire Education Department, Interior Department and “the environmental agencies,” too.
Given Trump’s attacks on the safety net last time he was president, it also would not be surprising if he tried to unilaterally chop funding for other programs, such as Medicaid or nutritional assistance for babies and pregnant women in low-income households. Nor would Trump shock anyone if he were to use this power to exact vengeance, as when he threatened to withhold lifesaving pandemic assistance unless “ungrateful” governors groveled before him.
To be clear: This would all be illegal.
Trump has tried withholding congressionally appropriated funds before. Remember when he withheld aid to Ukraine because he wanted President Volodymyr Zelensky to do him a “favor” (provide incriminating evidence about the Biden family)? That was an illegal impoundment, the Government Accountability Office determined.
Former president Richard M. Nixon also (unsuccessfully) tried to impound spending, many times. Like Trump, Nixon believed he had the power to reshape policy and funding decisions — congressional statutes and constitutional checks and balances be damned.
Nixon’s impoundment measures were challenged in federal court. Every time courts ruled on the merits, they decided against him, according to Georgetown University law professor David Super. The best-known of those cases — Train v. City of New York, filed after Nixon refused to spend Clean Water Act money on water and sewer systems — made it to the Supreme Court. Every justice agreed that the president’s personal policy preferences could not override appropriations mandated by Congress.
Trump says he has a plan for getting around these inconvenient precedents: It involves convincing Congress to roll back a 1974 law known as the Impoundment Control Act. But that law was passed after Nixon’s impoundment actions, which means that even if it were repealed entirely, presidential impoundment of the Nixonian kind Trump describes would … still be illegal.
In fact, one consequence of the 1974 law was to effectively grant presidents slightly more authority to sometimes withhold funding. (Basically, it created a process for presidents to temporarily not spend money, provided they formally request congressional amendments to rescind funding in existing laws.)
So if anything, the statutory change Trump proposes would do the opposite of what he wants. That is, it would reduce his authority to impound money, not expand it. (Hey, no one ever mistook Trump for a great legal mind.)
In any event, Trump is telegraphing to Congress that he plans a constitutional showdown. Regardless of what courts have decided in the past, and despite what our founding documents say, he believes he personally deserves the power to set funding levels for the entire federal government.
When asked about these plans, many Republican lawmakers have basically shrugged. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told my Post colleagues that impoundment was simply a “tool in the toolbox” for reducing spending.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. Legislators have willingly ceded other constitutional duties before, including declaring war and regulating commerce with foreign nations. Trump’s plans to seize spending authority would satisfy both his desire to grab power and Congress’s desire to cede it.
Everybody wins! Except democracy, that is.
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