Sources close to former President Trump say he has a plan in place to avoid putting Congress back into a “disgraceful” and “ridiculous” spending situation. If he returns to the White House, Trump will try to revive the power that Congress stripped the presidency of nearly half a century ago.
What President Nixon squandered, his campaign promises, Trump will restore, namely the seizure power. “Most of you,” the former president told a New Hampshire audience Thursday, “don’t know what that is.” True, few remember now.
Impoundment, if reinstated, would allow a president, in theory, to refuse to spend funds through Congress. More than just a way to cut spending, Trump sees that kind of power as the key to starving and cracking down on the so-called “deep state.”
But such a move would fundamentally shift the balance of power, and any attempt to restore a long-forgotten power would guarantee a lengthy legal battle over who exactly controls the power of the purse. Trump welcomed the fight. Some budget experts believe he will get nowhere.
In a statement to RealClearPolitics, Trump described it as a “secret weapon” to crush the “bloated federal bureaucracy while doing everything America needs and more.”
“This constitutional power of the president should never be curtailed, but I will reclaim it and use it to stop inflation and bring federal spending under control,” the former president added.
Regardless, advisers close to the former president told RealClearPolitics that he plans to challenge the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act in court and, if that fails, lean on the Legislature to repeal it. The second requires passing a law to delegate power, something lawmakers loathed to do.
Congress is already at war with another president who has broad views about his own authority. And Congress won.
Inflation in the 1970s, the Nixon White House complained, was a result of the fraudulent “Credit Card Congress.” The California Republican warned Capitol Hill not to spend more than $250 billion. When his warning was ignored, Nixon refused to spend the allocated money. Rebukes came from the Supreme Court when the President stopped funding for environmental projects. But weakened by Watergate, Nixon eventually signed legislation effectively handing over the power exercised by presidents Thomas Jefferson to Lyndon B. Johnson.
Russ Vaught, Trump’s last director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the concession of impoundment power a “real sin” that ensures “the executive branch no longer plays a meaningful role” in the appropriations process. Vote told RCP in an interview that the power of the purse has become a “caricature,” where instead of “setting ceilings,” Congress now sets “spending floors.”
Hence, Trump’s “happy” signature on multi-trillion-dollar spending bills.
Trump promised to “not sign another bill like this” in 2018 before signing the “crazy” $1.3 trillion spending bill. Two years later, he signed another omnibus bill, worth $1.4 trillion. .” Both times, Trump justified voting for bloated bills hated by conservatives by pointing to increased military spending.
Restoring sequestration authority, thereby giving presidents an option to curb spending beyond a mere veto, is part of the second-term plan, current Trump campaign and former Trump administration officials told RCP.
The former president said repealing the 1974 law was unconstitutional and would rule under it if he returned to the White House.
“Yes, there is an attempt to overturn it in the courts. Yes, there is legislative effort, but when you think a law is unconstitutional, Vote told RCP that the administration should look to “do the bare minimum of what the courts require” and “push the envelope.”
Trump did something similar, implementing what Trump called “impoundment-like authorities,” when he froze nearly $400 million in foreign aid to Ukraine even though the funds were appropriated by Congress. The Government Accountability Office later said Trump violated the law by doing so. The House impeached him over a phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky regarding money.
Trump’s OMB disputed the GAO’s ruling at the time, saying the administration had its appropriations authority to spend the money according to the most efficient timetable.
“The reason there wasn’t a confiscation was that we didn’t have the authority to pocket the money and not spend it,” Vought recalled, adding that if a new model were in place, the administration “would have had the potential. The ability to go further and pocket the money.
Trump believes detention is a “key tool” in his fight against the administrative state. “Bringing back the impoundment gives us a critical tool to eradicate the deep state, drain the swamps and starve the warmongers,” he said in a campaign video first obtained and reported by Semaphore. “We can choke on money.”
His campaign pointed RCP to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency that House Republicans accuse of engaging in censorship of Americans, as a prime example of where the dollars could be seized.
But even some conservatives have their doubts. “There’s a limited amount of wiggle room” when it comes to actually reducing the money spent, says Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“The idea that the president is going to achieve any kind of significant savings or reduction in the size of the administrative state by implementing officials is ludicrous,” Kosar told RCP.
The policy wonk admits that the reform Nixon signed into law, mandating a complex and cumbersome budget process, rarely works. But short of repealing and replacing that law, he said, “a president who refuses to spend money expressly appropriated for a particular purpose, saying he doesn’t want to do it, is pretty much grounds for impeachment.”
Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce in the Clinton administration, agrees that the current budget process “has become so dysfunctional that it is ripe for reform.”
Now a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she points to the partisan gridlock and numerous government shutdowns that characterize the current process. “The number of shutdowns in the entire history of the U.S. before 1974,” Bilmes told RCP in an interview, “is zero.”
Congress has been mulling over how to reform the way taxpayer money is spent for some time. Lawmakers consistently fail to pass individual appropriations bills, usually opting to pass a single spending bill at the end of the year and at the last minute.
But even if the process is reformed, Bilmes said, “the basic premise of the law, which is that the Constitution vests ultimate power in Congress, is unlikely to change.”
While she disagrees with the idea that the impoundment law needs to be removed to reduce the national debt, she said there is a recent precedent for taming runaway spending. Bilmes pointed to the RCP’s deals between Bill Clinton and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. It is possible again. In theory.