White House Launches Another Assault on Science Funding

Scientific American

a day ago

CLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration is working on a new effort to both weaken Congress' grip on the federal budget and freeze billions of dollars in spending at several government agencies.
The architect behind the move is Russ Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. Vought has long lamented the limits placed on the president's ability to direct federal spending. His latest gambit — which has not been reported previously — appears designed to test those boundaries.
His office late last week directed several agencies, including EPA, the Interior and Health and Human Services departments as well as the National Science Foundation, to freeze upward of $30 billion in spending on a broad array of programs, according to both agency emails and two people familiar with the plan.
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POLITICO's E&E News granted anonymity to the two people so they could speak freely without fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.
OMB's targets include NSF research and education programs that operate using funding leftover from 2024. Also on the list are tens of millions of dollars for national park operations as well as more than $100 million in science spending at NASA, which includes climate research.
While the president has some measure of control over how federal agencies spend their money, the 'power of the purse' lies primarily with Congress under the U.S. Constitution. Put another way: Lawmakers set the budget.
Vought is trying to turn that principle on its head.
The order to freeze some funding at more than a dozen agencies comes in advance of a budget spending deferrals package the White House plans to send Congress. Spending deferrals allow the executive branch to temporarily prevent authorized dollars from going out the door — but only if lawmakers sign off on the move.
The deferrals strategy seems to fly in the face of Congress' constitutional power of the purse and the Impoundment Control Act, said Joseph Carlile, former associate director at OMB in the Biden administration.
'There is a right, a legal way, for the administration to rescind things and I guess they're pursuing this because they don't have their stuff together or don't care about the law,' said Carlile, who also worked previously on budgetary oversight on the House Appropriations Committee for 13 years.
'This is consistent with an administration that believes that they have broader powers around budget and spending than any other administration has ever been able to find,' Carlile added.
White House officials did not deny the new strategy when asked about it. Rather, it was described as a way to lock in spending cuts prescribed by the Department of Government Efficiency, a cost-cutting outfit championed by Trump donor and entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Yet the White House has worked to keep the effort quiet.
The White House directive was communicated largely to agencies over the phone to avoid creating a paper trail, said one administration source with direct knowledge of the effort.
OMB officials are preparing a unique strategy to weaken congressional budget authority under a Nixon-era law that limits the president's ability to block spending for political reasons. Vought has said repeatedly he does not agree with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which Democrats and legal scholars have said he already has violated.
'We're not in love with the law,' Vought told CNN recently.
The White House already has sent to Congress a $9.4 billion rescissions package to permanently cut funding for NPR and PBS as well as foreign aid. Vought has said he expects to send more rescissions packages to Congress.
Vought's multipronged strategy also is likely to include a 'pocket rescissions' strategy, by which the White House intentionally runs out the clock near the end of the fiscal year. If a package is introduced then, Congress has a very limited time to act — and if it does not do so — the funds slated for elimination are automatically canceled.
The White House may use the pocket rescissions strategy if the $9.4 billion rescissions package does not pass Congress, the official said. And it could pursue another pocket rescissions strategy centered around Labor Department spending,
The deferrals package is a third and separate strategy — and it comes ahead of an expected congressional fight on lifting the debt ceiling before the end of the summer. It would essentially pause or significantly slow funding intentionally, until it can be crafted into a separate pocket rescissions package that can run down the clock and be made permanent.
Under the impoundment law, the White House can ask Congress to defer some of its budget spending authority "to provide for contingencies" or "to achieve savings" through efficiency gains. The White House is planning to argue that hitting the debt ceiling — a borrowing limit imposed and periodically raised by Congress — is such a contingency.
The nation is expected to reach the debt ceiling by the end of August.
The White House strategy is to delay or block funds now, then craft an additional rescissions package later in the year that would make such cuts permanent.
'OMB is hard at work making the DOGE cuts permanent using a wide range of tools we have at our disposal under the ICA [Impoundment Control Act] and within the President's authority— just like the first rescissions package that was sent up to the Hill this week,' OMB spokesperson Rachel Cauley said in a statement. 'As a part of that process, we are constantly checking in with agencies to assess their unobligated balances.'
Fight could land at Supreme Court
The latest effort may be more comprehensive than other blocks on federal funding that Vought has enacted, according to the source with direct knowledge of the move.
It could also be a 'trial balloon' to see whether the White House can unilaterally block future spending if Trump administration officials have an objection, said another source at an impacted agency.
The move appears to be a significant escalation of Vought's efforts to test the boundaries of the Impoundment Control Act.
Vought's strategy is to rely on Section 1013 of the act, which grants the president the authority to freeze spending if the administration explains its actions to lawmakers. The act originally allowed one chamber of Congress to reject presidential deferrals, a power that courts rejected. As a result, the law was amended in 1987 to limit how long presidents could delay spending and under what conditions.
"It does not appear that any measures to disapprove a deferral have been considered since these amendments were made," the Congressional Research Service said in a February report on the impoundment law.
Vought has long argued that impounding some congressionally appropriated funding is constitutional, and he has said he wants the Supreme Court to validate what would be a significant weakening of congressional oversight of the federal budget.
The deferrals package the White House plans to send Congress would temporarily stop agencies from spending unobligated funds that remain at the end of the government's fiscal year on Sept. 30.
The broad-based deferrals package is highly unusual and could be part of his strategy to take his fight for greater executive power to the Supreme Court, said Philip Joyce, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy and author of "The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power, and Policymaking."
'It is a novel approach, but I think in the end, they really want this to go to the Supreme Court,' Joyce said. 'They think they know how the Supreme Court is going to rule and once the Supreme Court opens the door, you know, it's kind of high noon for the separation of powers, which is what they want.'
Last week, OMB officials reached out to federal agencies to tell them to enact the spending freeze. Some agency officials were 'shocked' at the move, according to the administration source with direct knowledge of the plan.
The head of the National Science Foundation's budget office didn't know what to make of the directive, according to an email obtained by E&E News.
OMB is targeting the agency's research and education "accounts for a deferral package," NSF budget director Caitlyn Fife wrote Friday in a note to top officials.
"I imagine you will all have questions, as do we," she said. "However we are immediately focused on pulling the funds back to ensure there are no further commitments or obligations."
An NSF official briefed on the spending freeze said that offices that were relying on previous year funding could see their "programs gutted." The agency source also predicted that, if OMB's ploy succeeds, it will use deferrals to impound any congressionally directed spending the administration opposes.
That means the deferrals package strategy is likely the start of a significant and questionable push to expand executive power, said Carlile, the former OMB associate director.
The White House is essentially seeking to subvert the Constitution, which grants Congress spending authority, in such an extreme way that it threatens the nation's democratic structure, he said.
'I think it upends a fundamental check and balance contemplated in our Constitution and I don't understand how you subordinate Congress' power of the purse,' Carlile said.
'This is a deal between the executive and the legislative branch as institutions, and this all starts to unravel real quick if our budgetary framework really actually meant nothing.'