Voldemort's spending fight about the constitution?

Trump is the first President arguably since Bill Clinton to make a genuine attempt to reduce government spending (or at least curtail the spiraling up of such). He deserves credit for that.

32 days into his presidency, he's certainly cutting waste, however he's also cutting muscle and trampling over the rights of government workers who actually do a good job and support taxpayers' quality of life. This could come back to haunt him either when the ability of our government to provide basic services is jeopardized or the PR backlash brings Voldemort's popularity crashing.

It's still early and I'm praying he wises up and learns /adjusts his approach. His biggest mistake is a "people one". Putting Musk in charge of this. As I've always said, beware of the expert out of his field. Musk is a talented guy who's often FOS and is the creator of the Cybertruck. Enough said.

Anyone who trusts Musk or thinks his financial interests align with taxpayers is naive.

This Spending Fight Is Actually About the Constitution

With unilateral freezes and cuts, Trump is testing how far he can encroach on Congress’s power of the purse

By Greg Ip, WSJ

Feb. 21, 2025 5:30 am ET

As Washington gears up for epic negotiations over taxes and spending, another fiscal fight is unfolding in the background. This one isn’t about how much to spend, but about who controls that spending: Congress or the president?

The Constitution assigns power of the purse to Congress. But in his early actions and words, President Trump is taking more of that power for himself. Rather than propose a budget, then wait for Congress to legislate actual spending, his administration froze a swath of federal grants (though it walked that back), cut other spending, such as on medical research overhead and foreign aid, and idled entire agencies.

Trump allies like Russell Vought, budget director in Trump’s first and current term, have long argued the president should have more discretion to spend—or not—as he sees fit. If Congress and the courts go along with that view, it would represent a generational shift in power from the legislative to the executive branch. The president would emerge with much more freedom to pursue policies at odds with Congress’s intent.

Republicans hope this will yield savings to reduce the deficit and finance tax cuts. But the real issue isn’t the scale of spending; it’s whose priorities govern that spending. Trump’s team wants to restore what they consider the president’s rightful say over the nation’s finances, especially the countless programs funded through annual appropriations.

Appropriations bills aren’t glamorous. But they are the one chance Congress gets each year to evaluate and direct the executive branch, said Eloise Pasachoff, a law professor at Georgetown University.

“That’s why appropriations laws are thousands of pages. It’s not just sums of money. It’s conditions, and set-asides, and carve-outs. If the president starts to say we are not bound by appropriations laws and Congress sort of blesses it, it’s another step toward an imperial executive which…the founders were pretty emphatic we shouldn’t have.”

Legislative control of the purse can be traced to the Glorious Revolution in 17th-century England, when the king agreed to parliamentary supremacy on expenditure and taxation. The American framers enshrined that principle in the U.S. Constitution, which says, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

This is usually interpreted as requiring the president to spend what Congress appropriates. Trump allies disagree.

“Until the Presidency of Richard Nixon, it was overwhelmingly understood that the power of the purse restricted only the President’s ability to spend more than an appropriation—it was not understood to prohibit the President from spending less than an appropriation,” Mark Paoletta co-wrote in an article last year for the Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Vought. Paoletta is now general counsel for the White House Office of Management and Budget.

He cited numerous examples before Nixon of “impoundment”—presidents refusing to spend appropriated funds—such as Thomas Jefferson impounding $50,000 for gunboats on the Mississippi during negotiations over the Louisiana Purchase.

In 1974 Congress, angry at Nixon’s many impoundments, explicitly prohibited the practice with the Impoundment Control Act. It included escape clauses: The president can ask Congress to rescind spending (a “rescission”) or he can defer spending to later in the fiscal year, while notifying Congress. Rarely has either been used.

In his first three weeks, President Trump has pushed the government’s checks and balances designed to limit executive power. Here’s a look at how the system works, what’s happening now and when it would become a constitutional crisis.

Vought considers the Impoundment Control Act an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s powers. But the Supreme Court has twice slapped down the president for deviating from legislated spending: in 1975 in a case over environmental spending, and in 1998 when it ruled the “line-item veto”—allowing the president to veto parts, rather than the entirety, of a bill—unconstitutional.

Presidents can still influence spending without impoundment, such as deciding which drugs and procedures programs like Medicare and Medicaid will cover. And for practical reasons, sometimes money can’t or shouldn’t be spent as prescribed; perhaps a flood prevents a bridge from being built.

The controversy arises when the president actually defies Congress, such as when President Barack Obama made Affordable Care Act payments to health insurers and Trump raided Pentagon funds to build a border wall. Both episodes triggered separation-of-powers court cases. President Biden’s cancellation of student debt was a breathtaking exercise of fiscal fiat, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal.

Perhaps the biggest controversy arose during Trump’s first term when he held up military aid to Ukraine while pressuring its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe Biden’s family. Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, later ruled that an illegal impoundment.

At his confirmation hearing last month, Vought disputed that finding. “We were engaged in a policy process with regard to how funding would flow to Ukraine. We released the funding by the end of the fiscal year,” he said.

Rather than challenge the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act outright, the administration for now is testing the limits of what it can do under current law. “Temporary pauses on the disbursement of federal funds are commonplace,” it said last month in response to a lawsuit against its sweeping funding freeze. District Judge Loren AliKhan wasn’t having it, ruling the administration “attempted to wrest the power of the purse away from the only branch of government entitled to wield it.”

Philip Wallach, who studies the separation of powers for the American Enterprise Institute, said Trump’s intent is to “essentially eliminate various parts of the government. And pretty quickly you get into something that looks like a de facto impoundment, even if they never call it that.”

Democrats are alarmed. They pressed Vought at his confirmation on whether he would disburse funds Congress has already approved, such as $3.8 billion in remaining security assistance to Ukraine. Vought said, “I’m not going to get ahead of the policy process.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) asked, “How will Congress be able to negotiate in good faith if the president is simply able to disregard the bipartisan laws that are passed through the appropriation process? How do we negotiate with someone who says, ‘I’m just going to do what I want. To hell with the Constitution’?”

Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) was more relaxed, telling reporters this week that the left seems angrier at Elon Musk personally rather than the waste his Department of Government Efficiency has identified. But Paul, a constitutional stickler, said for Musk’s savings to count, they should be “bundled into a rescission package and sent back to Congress.”

And to constrain the president from moving money around, he told his colleagues last month, “We’ve got to write better legislation.”