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Trump wants the power to refuse to spend federal dollars that Congress has already approved.
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He has vowed to challenge a Nixon-era law that limits the president’s power over “seizures.”
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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have endorsed this approach as a way to implement their DOGE cuts.
President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have long indicated that if elected to a second term, he will seek to ease the constraints that presidents typically face in carrying out their agenda.
That vision is already starting to take shape, with Trump’s recent demand for recess appointments signaling a desire to sidestep the Senate’s role in confirming his nominees. But the president-elect doesn’t just want more control over the workforce. He also plans to try to assert his power over government financing by simply refusing to spend money already approved by Congress.
It’s called “impoundment,” and it’s been largely illegal for the president since 1974, when Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act after President Richard Nixon refused to spend congressionally approved funds on programs he personally opposed.
But in a June 2023 campaign video, Trump argued that the law is unconstitutional and vowed to “do everything I can to challenge the law in court and “if necessary, get Congress to overturn it.”
If Trump were to successfully push for the repeal of that law, he could gain unilateral power to expropriate large parts of the federal government, refuse to provide foreign aid, or withhold federal funds to pressure others to comply to submit to his will.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of a newly announced Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in a joint op-ed Wednesday that they “believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with Trump and declare the law unconstitutional.” Seizure has been suggested as a way Trump could single-handedly implement DOGE-recommended cuts to the federal budget.
Meanwhile, lawmakers on Capitol Hill — including those on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees that oversee government spending — appear unconcerned about Trump’s power grab.
“I’ll have to contact you about this,” Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia told BI. “I haven’t dreamed of backwater and haven’t really focused on it, so I don’t know.”
“To be honest, I haven’t really been following it closely,” Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama told BI, later adding in a spokesman’s statement that he would “like to work with Trump on resolving of problems” which he calls a “broken” budget process.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told BI that Trump “does not have the constitutional authority” to seize money, but said her “first order of business” is dealing with an upcoming government funding cut. term.
‘Congress cannot simply be pushed aside’
Trump’s quest for seizure powers is likely to draw resistance, at least from Congress. Financing the government has long involved a complex set of negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and spending bills typically include a wide range of provisions intended to satisfy different groups of lawmakers. If Trump could unilaterally tinker with these arrangements after the fact, it would represent a significant shift in power away from the legislature.
“If it’s something that further weakens the ability of Congress to do its job as it should, then I’m going to look at that very carefully,” said Rep. Mark Amodei, a Nevada Republican who serves on the House Appropriations Committee. against BI. . He added that “there would be a problem” if Trump tried to seize funding approved by both houses of Congress.
“Congress cannot simply be overruled,” said Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, a Democratic member of the committee. “I hope we don’t let ourselves be pushed aside, but we’ll see.”
But Trump also faces a much more obedient Republican party than during his first term, and even Republican appropriators aren’t completely ruling out seizure. Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the committee’s Republican chairman, has characterized the seizure as a “tool in the toolbox” for Trump, according to The Washington Post.
What Trump could do with such far-reaching powers
Even if Congress doesn’t want to grant Trump seizure powers, he has another potentially more attractive avenue: the courts.
It remains an open question whether the Supreme Court will ultimately side with Trump and strike down the law, giving him sweeping power to cut government funding at his request.
“I think we’ve always been very aware of the fact that this court has broken tradition on a whole range of issues, whether it’s reproductive rights or immunity,” Morelle said. “When we talk about the fact that the American people didn’t elect a king — we don’t have a sovereign — that’s what we’re talking about.”
In general, Trump and other Republican Party supporters have described this primarily as a means to simply reduce government spending, which he sees as wasteful.
“If fewer resources are needed to implement a program than are appropriated, an agency should not be forced to waste taxpayer dollars,” wrote Mark Paoletta, a Republican attorney who worked in the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget. government, in a June opinion piece. “If there is room for cuts in federal programs, why should the president be restrained from directing agencies to reduce the size of the federal government?”
But there are also concerns that Trump could use that power in a more punitive way, withholding money set aside for projects in individual lawmakers’ districts to punish them for crossing his path. Daniel Schuman, a congressional expert and executive director of the American Governance Institute, outlined a variety of scenarios in a July op-ed.
“The president is not supposed to be a super legislator in that way,” Schuman said recently in an interview with BI. “The president should not be able to blackmail members of Congress.”
Trump-Vance Transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt did not address BI’s investigation into whether Trump might pursue such punitive measures, saying in a statement only that the president-elect “has a mandate to keep the promises he made during the campaign done” and that “he will deliver.”
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