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Donald Trump has vowed to cut a wide range of government services and is entering his second term with a sweeping plan to do so. Rather than relying on party control of Congress to cut the budget, Trump and his advisers will test an obscure legal theory that says the president has broad powers to withhold funding for programs he doesn’t like. I intend to.
“All we have to do is defund it,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. “For 200 years under our system of government, there has been no debate that the president has the constitutional authority to halt unnecessary spending.”
His plan, known as “seizure,” threatens to spark a major conflict over the limits of presidential budget control. Although the Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to appropriate federal funds, the executive branch’s role is to allocate funds effectively. But Trump and his advisers have argued that the president can unilaterally ignore and “seize” funds if he disagrees with Congress’ spending decisions or deems them wasteful. are.
President Trump’s budget proposal is part of his administration’s larger plan to consolidate as much executive power as possible. This month, he pressed the Senate to go into recess so he could appoint Cabinet members without oversight. (So far, Republicans who control the chamber have not agreed to this.) His top advisers have detailed plans to bring independent agencies such as the Justice Department under political control.
If President Trump were to assert the power to override programs approved by Congress, a fight would almost certainly erupt in federal courts and Congress, potentially fundamentally changing Congress’s bedrock power, experts say. say.
“This is an effort to take all federal budget power away from Congress, and that’s not the design of the Constitution,” said Eloise Pasachev, a Georgetown law professor who has written about the federal budget and appropriations process. “The president doesn’t have the power to go through the budget piecemeal and take out things he doesn’t like.”
President Trump’s claim that he has the power to foreclose is based on a Nixon-era law that prohibits presidents from blocking spending based on policy disagreements and prohibits presidents from vetoing spending unless Congress grants them flexibility. This violates a series of federal court decisions.
In an op-ed published Wednesday, tech billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who will oversee the newly created Department of Non-Government Efficiency, argue that they will cut federal spending and lay off civil servants. He wrote that he planned to fire him. Part of their effort could be Trump’s first Supreme Court challenge to the post-Watergate Congressional Budget and Seizure Control Act of 1974, which requires presidents to spend funds authorized by Congress. The law allows for exceptions, such as when the executive branch can meet Congressional goals by cutting spending, but not as a way to kill plans the president opposes.
President Trump and his aides have been telegraphing plans for a hostile takeover of the budget process for months. In a campaign video, President Trump denounced the 1974 law as “not a very good thing” and said, “Reinstating detention would give us an important tool to destroy the deep state.”
Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have seized the role, writing, “We believe the current Supreme Court is likely to side with Mr. Musk on this issue.”
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The once-obscure debate over detention has become prevalent in MAGA circles, thanks to veterans of Trump’s first administration who remain close to the president. Russell Vought, Trump’s former budget director, and Mark Paoletta, who served as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget under Vought, promoted the idea of the Center for American Renewal, a pro-Trump think tank founded by Vought. I’ve been trying to.
On Friday, President Trump announced that he had reappointed Vought to head OMB. “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the deep state and end weaponized government, and he will help us restore self-government to our people,” Trump said in a statement.
Vought was also the top architect of the controversial Project 2025. In private remarks at a gathering of MAGA celebrities uncovered by ProPublica, Vought said he would form a “shadow” general counsel’s office to ensure President Trump had legal recourse from day one. I was proud that I was. Streamlining to realize his agenda.
“I don’t want President Trump wasting his time in the Oval Office arguing about whether something is legal, workable, moral,” Vought said.
President Trump’s press secretary and Vought did not respond to requests for comment.
The prospect of Mr. Trump seizing significant control over federal spending is not just about reducing the size of the federal government, a long-standing goal of conservatives. It also fuels new fears about his promise of revenge.
A similar power grab led to his first impeachment. During his first term, Trump kept nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine while pressuring President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to launch a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and his family. The U.S. Government Accountability Office later ruled that his actions violated the Detention Management Act.
Pasachev predicted that if the situation was favorable, the incoming Trump administration would try to achieve its goal of capture without choosing such a high-profile fight.
Bobby Kogan, a former OMB adviser under the Biden administration and senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning think tank American Progress, said President Trump has moved beyond Ukraine’s arms imports as a way to punish what he sees as an enemy. He said he had tried a step-by-step approach to withholding federal funding. After devastating wildfires in California and Washington, President Trump delayed signing a disaster declaration that would have lifted federal relief aid because neither state voted for him. or refused. He targeted so-called sanctuary cities by making federal grants conditional on the willingness of local police to cooperate in mass deportation efforts. The Biden administration ultimately reversed the policy.
Mr. Trump and his aides have argued that the president has a long history of incarceration dating back to Thomas Jefferson.
Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California School of Law in San Francisco, said most historical examples involve the military, where Congress explicitly gave the president the power to exercise discretion. For example, Jefferson decided not to spend the money Congress appropriated for gunboats. This was determined by a law that would appropriate funds for “not more than 15 gunboats” in an amount “not to exceed $50,000.” .
President Richard Nixon used the concept of taking billions of dollars out of programs he had simply opposed, including highway improvements, water treatment, drug rehabilitation, and farmers’ disaster relief, with new and extreme injunctions. went. He faced overwhelming opposition from both Congress and the courts. More than half a dozen federal judges and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the spending bill at issue did not give President Nixon flexibility to cut individual programs.
Mr. Vought and his allies argue that the restrictions Congress put in place in 1974 are unconstitutional, arguing that the Constitution’s provision requiring the president to “faithfully execute” the laws also implies executive powers for the president. It is claimed that there is. (President Trump likes to describe Article 2, which includes this clause, as giving him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”)
The Supreme Court has never directly considered whether detention is constitutional. However, the 1838 case Kendall v. United States over the payment of federal debts challenged that reasoning.
Mississippi’s segregated academies benefit from public funds just as they did in the 1960s.
“It is a novel construction of the Constitution and completely unacceptable to claim that the duty imposed on the president to see to the faithful execution of the law implies the power to prohibit its enforcement.” the judges wrote.
During the Nixon cut scandal, Nixon’s own Justice Department made much the same argument.
“Regarding the proposition that the president has the constitutional authority to veto the disbursement of appropriated funds,” William Rehnquist, head of the Office of General Counsel, later appointed by President Nixon to the Supreme Court, said in a statement that the 1969 law He warned in his memo: We must conclude that the existence of such broad powers is not supported by reason or precedent. ”
