Classically, Congress held the power of the purse, able to both bar and require spending. This imposed a significant limit on Presidential power. With a bought court supporting him, Trump would have significant ability to essentially chart power as a king.

  • someguy3@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    “I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings,” Trump said in a plan posted last year. “This will be in the form of tax reductions for you. This will help quickly to stop inflation and slash the deficit.”

    That pledge could provoke a dramatic constitutional showdown, with vast consequences for how the government operates. If he returns to office, these efforts are likely to turn typically arcane debates over “impoundment” authority — or the president’s right to stop certain spending programs — into a major political flash point, as he seeks to accomplish via edict what he cannot pass through Congress.

    Presidents since Thomas Jefferson have halted spending for programs approved by Congress. That typically has not proved controversial, because presidents have traditionally done so for routine managerial reasons or with specific statutory authorization, not to thwart the policy choices Congress made in appropriations laws.

    But President Richard M. Nixon faced an uproar after he refused to spend money across a broad array of domestic programs, such as farm assistance and water grants. In 1969, working in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist wrote a memo arguing that the president does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend appropriated funds, while reserving the possibility of limited exceptions for foreign policy and other policy areas. Federal courts struck down Nixon’s impoundments as illegal, and Congress approved strict new limits on the power as part of post-Watergate government reforms in 1974.

    During Trump’s first term, his allies grew increasingly frustrated with those limits.