Latest news with #CongressionalBudgetandImpoundmentControlAct
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump asks Congress to make (some of) DOGE's illegal cuts legal
President Donald Trump sent Congress a memo Tuesday night asking lawmakers to sign off on his administration's demand for roughly $9.4 billion in immediate spending cuts. If Congress passes that rescissions package, funding to NPR, PBS and a slew of foreign aid programs would be officially slashed. If this idea sounds familiar, it's because Trump is asking Congress to take back money for programs that he and Elon Musk have illegally refused to spend. The request is a nod to the way things are supposed to work under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, a law that makes it clear that the president has no authority to unilaterally withhold, or 'impound,' money the legislature has appropriated. Thus, the request itself is a tacit admission from the Trump administration that its refusal to spend money Congress has appropriated is against the law. If an administration doesn't want to spend money that has been budgeted, a 1974 law requires the White House to submit what boils down to a request for Congress to take its money back. Only after both chambers approve would the budget authority granted to specific departments and agencies be rescinded. Congress now has 45 days to pass the package before it expires and the administration is once again legally required to spend that money. In the memo passed on to Congress, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought laid out 22 specific cuts to be made. The largest single item in Vought's request would fully eliminate $1.07 billion allocated over the next two fiscal years to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB, as those of us who grew up watching 'Sesame Street' know, is the biggest source of funding for many PBS stations. Trump signed an executive order to slash the CPB's funding last month, but NPR and PBS have called the order unconstitutional and sued to have it overturned. But the bulk of the requested cuts are focused on drawing down funding to various international projects the Trump administration has decided 'do not align with an America First foreign policy agenda.' They apparently include such controversial concepts as promoting democracy ($83 million rescinded from the Democracy Fund), helping children ($437 million in contributions to UNICEF and other United Nations programs terminated), fighting HIV/AIDS ($400 million cut from programs like the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR), and saving lives after natural disasters ($496 million withdrawn from the International Disaster Assistance account). Among the smaller but pettier cuts requested is $125 million of the U.S. Agency of International Development's operating budget. It has been months since the Department of Government Oversight de facto shuttered USAID, which Musk famously boasted had been fed 'into the woodchipper,' with most of its contracts illegally cut and its employees fired. Many of those laid-off employees are also suing the administration for circumventing Congress in trying to shut down an agency Congress established by law. As with many things budget-related, several things are true at once here. On the one hand, the money that would be clawed back would undoubtedly have major, catastrophic impacts on the work it's funding. On the other, the $9 billion package is a drop in the bucket compared to the $2 trillion in savings that Musk originally promised to find with DOGE and a drop in the ocean compared to the annual $6.8 trillion federal budget. Getting the package through Congress would require only Republican votes, but that doesn't mean it will succeed. There has historically been little appetite from Congress for rescission requests; many lawmakers are aware of the political risk that comes with publicly voting to cut specific programs, especially popular ones. As Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, recently noted to reporters, 'there hasn't been a successful rescission package in many, many years.' But Musk has been unhappy with the lack of enthusiasm from Congress for codifying DOGE's cuts. The Tesla CEO, who just left his quasi-official government role, slammed the House's megabill as a 'pork-filled ... abomination.' Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said he called Musk to talk to him about the bill but got no answer. Even if congressional Republicans balk at the relatively small package, Vought has a backup plan: keep breaking the law. The OMB director recently appeared on CNN not only to say this was 'the first of many rescission bills,' but also to insist that impoundment remains on the table. He also echoed a truly absurd claim from his former think tank that as long as you illegally withhold money within the 45-day window before a fiscal year ends, you can do an end-run around Congress. To repeat, in presenting congressional Republicans with the chance to place a veneer of legality on DOGE's actions, the White House is tacitly admitting that the power of the purse still lies in Congress' hands. But Vought's attitude makes it clear this is a 'heads I win, tails you lose' proposition. If Congress doesn't go along with its rescission package, the Trump administration will simply continue to do as it has done and usurp the power of appropriation for itself. The sad thing is there are surely plenty of GOP lawmakers who, to avoid risking difficult votes, are willing to surrender their awesome power. This article was originally published on
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Congress and White House Head for Showdown Over Power of the Purse
Susan Collins was a Senate intern in 1974 when Congress, in response to President Richard M. Nixon's refusal to spend on projects he opposed, passed a sweeping budget law to bar presidents from overriding lawmakers when it came to doling out dollars. The resulting law, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, is 'very clear, and it re-emphasizes the power of the purse that Congress has under the Constitution,' Ms. Collins, now a 72-year-old Republican senator from Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said in an interview this week. She and her fellow appropriators in both parties will have a fight on their hands if they hope to retain supremacy in federal spending. The question of who has the final word is emerging as a central point of contention between members of Congress and the White House, a clash that is likely to escalate after the confirmation on Thursday of Russell T. Vought as the director of President Trump's Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Vought has flatly declared that he — and Mr. Trump — consider the budget act to be unconstitutional. They contend that the White House can choose what gets money and what doesn't even if it conflicts with specific directions from Congress through appropriations measures signed into law. Others on Capitol Hill, including some Republicans, vehemently dispute that idea. The disagreement is spurring the uproar over Mr. Trump's move to suspend trillions of dollars in federal spending while the executive branch reviews it to determine whether it complies with the his newly issued policy dictates, as well as the president's efforts to gut the United States Agency for International Development. Administration officials and many Republicans on Capitol Hill say that the president is acting within his authority and that Democrats and other critics are overreacting to a warranted and overdue attempt to scrutinize federal spending. 'There are many, many, many agencies out there, and this is going to be coming down the pike on every amount of government spending,' said Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. 'Elections have consequences, and this is one of the consequences: that we are going to do our best to reduce spending, do it by efficiencies.' Democrats argue that the new administration is ignoring both the law and the Constitution in usurping spending power from lawmakers and that Mr. Vought in particular is unfit for his position because of his extreme views on the authority of the executive branch. Democrats kept the Senate in overnight on Wednesday and engaged in a floor marathon assailing Mr. Vought in protest of his nomination, even though they were unable to prevent the Republican majority from confirming him. 'He's the last person who should be put in the heart of the operation of our government,' Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, said as he warned Republicans about the dangers of ceding congressional spending power to the White House. 'Once this door is open, it's going to be very difficult to close it again no matter who the president is, no matter who is in charge.' Serving on the Appropriations Committee has traditionally been one of the plum assignments in Congress, granting significant influence over how huge sums are spent and providing an influential perch to direct money back home. Even the leaders of the subcommittees that oversee funding specific sections of the government have such a powerful status that they are known on Capitol Hill as cardinals. But with a new focus on cutting spending, the job has fewer rewards. Add in the prospect of a White House that ignores the directions of Congress entirely and makes its own decisions on where the dollars should go, and some lawmakers are questioning their roles. They fear that allowing its spending power to be significantly diminished would render Congress almost irrelevant. 'What's the point of being an appropriator?' Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a member of the Senate panel, asked this week. The escalating conflict is already spilling into the lingering effort to finish off the spending bills for the current year. A stopgap bill keeping the government open will expire on March 14, leading to a government shutdown if no agreement can be reached. With many Republicans, particularly in the House, unwilling to vote for spending bills, Democrats have had to provide the necessary votes over the past two years to fund the government. Now some are wondering why they should help majority Republicans if the White House will simply spend money the way it sees fit rather than listening to the House and the Senate. 'If you can't trust that the president will follow the law, we have a huge problem on our hands, and that's where we are right now,' said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and another appropriator. Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said he had backed spending bills in the past only to see Democratic presidents act contrary to the legislation. Democrats, he said, needed to accept that Mr. Trump was delivering the spending review he promised in his campaign. 'They are not in the majority in either chamber, and they don't occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and they're mad about that,' Mr. Cole said. 'So they have to work through that.' Speaker Mike Johnson has portrayed himself as a defender of the House's prized power over spending, but he has also suggested that it is unclear just how far that power extends. 'If they are executive branch agencies, the executive branch is in charge of them,' Mr. Johnson told reporters this week. 'Congress funds them, but there are important questions to be asked about all the parameters of that. It is not an easy answer.' With Congress and the White House under Republican control and lawmakers badly divided on the extent of the leeway Mr. Trump has, Ms. Collins predicted that answer would most likely come from the government's third branch: the judiciary. The courts will have to determine whether Mr. Trump is overreaching or if lawmakers have less control over the purse strings than they have long insisted upon. 'Ultimately,' Ms. Collins said, 'we are headed for a court fight.'
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The 50-Year-Old Law Trump Is Challenging To Create Chaos
In July 1974, then-President Richard Nixon, weakened by the Watergate scandal and only weeks away from becoming the first president to resign, signed the innocuously titled 'Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act.' He didn't have much of a choice: The bipartisan bill passed the Senate 80 to 0 and 386 to 23 in the House. More than 50 years later, though, that decision is still reverberating through Washington after President Donald Trump's Office of Management and Budget issued a memo late Monday night asking agencies to identify all forms of 'federal financial assistance' through grants and loans and pause them while the administration reviews them. That was exactly what the 1974 law, which also created the Congressional Budget Office, was supposed to prevent, critics of the Trump administration say. The law was meant to keep the White House from picking and choosing what programs it wanted to fund over what programs Congress had funded, with its 'power of the purse' appropriations authority in the U.S. Constitution. Broadly, the law forbids impoundment — withholding approved funds from being used — in all but a few minor circumstances. The administration can ask Congress to take back its approval of the spending, rescinding the authority, and withhold the money for up to 45 days. But unless Congress approves the rescission, the funding has to be released after the 45-day period. The administration can also defer spending the money, but only if they send a message to Congress outlining why they want to defer it, the legal authority for doing so and the things that went into the decision-making process. Monday's memo did not appear to invoke either of those circumstances, raising the likelihood of a successful legal challenge. A prolonged court fight, though, or one that makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court, may be exactly what the administration wants, however. Russ Vought, Trump's former OMB director who has been nominated to again lead the budget office, told senators in two confirmation hearings that he would follow the law but added that he and Trump thought the 1974 law was unconstitutional. 'The president and his team is going to go through a review with our lawyers, if confirmed, including the Department of Justice, to explore the parameters of the law with regard to the Impoundment Control Act,' Vought said at his Senate Budget Committee hearing. Vought also said delays in funding authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law passed under former President Joe Biden were not impoundments but 'programmatic delays,' an exception not found in the anti-impoundment law. 'Those [executive orders] were, again, pauses to ensure that the funding that is in place is consistent and moves in a direction along the lines of what the president ran on, unleashing American energy, away from the Green New Deal,' Vought said. Vought grounded his opposition to the 1974 law in history. 'The reason the president ran on this is that 200 years of presidents had this authority to manage taxpayer resources,' Vought told Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that determines annual funding for federal agencies and programs. While the 1974 law has not been subject to much litigation, the underlying idea that impoundment is illegal is rooted in a Supreme Court ruling that grew out of the activities that caused Congress to pass the law. In a 9-0 decision that included then-Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative, the court ruled against the administration in a case called Train v. City of New York. In that case, the Nixon administration had sought to spend only $2 billion of $5 billion in funds approved for water and sewer improvement for 1973 and only $3 billion of $6 billion approved for 1974. The brief opinion by Justice Byron White in 1975 said even though Congress may pass language in spending bills saying totals should not 'exceed' specific amounts, the amounts specified were the binding numbers for spending, and the administration did not have the power to unilaterally spend less. Trump Again Tests The Bounds Of Presidential Power In Firing Of Latest Official Donald Trump's Budget Pause Causes Concern At Meals On Wheels; Official Says Not To Worry CNN Trump-Baiting Anchor Announces He's Exiting The Network
