Recent presidents have not been shy about claiming broad powers, but President Donald Trump has taken this trend into a crucial new area: federal spending.
In just the past 11 months, his administration has canceled billions of dollars in foreign aid, frozen billions of dollars in research grants, imposed new conditions on other grants and contracts, slashed agency staffs, and even sought to claw back certain prior grant payments. At the same time, it has employed military resources to assist immigration enforcement, offered civil-service buyouts without statutory authority, and reportedly used a private donation to help pay military salaries during this fall’s government shutdown.
These precedents might well establish a new normal. Presidents tend not to cede powers claimed by their predecessors, so reversing presidential control over spending will require pushback from Congress. And whereas Congress did put up a fight when earlier presidents such as Richard Nixon attempted similar maneuvers, Congress today is a more divided and less effective body. So far, its response to Trump has been weak.
If this pattern holds, the result will be less responsive governance, more wild swings in policy across administrations, and a less restrained and accountable executive branch. America is dangerously close to a world in which all federal policy hinges on the outcomes of presidential elections, no matter how narrow the margin of victory.
Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress holds the “power of the purse,” meaning the authority to direct federal spending. Because the Constitution forbids any withdrawal of Treasury funds “but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” Congress needs to enact special statutes (“appropriations”) allowing any expenditure. That means no benefits can go out, no weapons can get bought, and no government salaries can get paid unless Congress specifically provides the necessary funds.
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Although it sometimes authorizes spending on a permanent basis, Congress often does so instead in limited amounts and for limited periods of time, typically one year. That is why the government “shuts down” without new appropriations: If the fiscal year ends before Congress provides new money, agencies are left without the funds to operate.
The British Parliament invented this practice of time-limited appropriations to keep their kings and queens in check, and today it serves much the same purpose. Because presidents need new legislation from Congress each year just to keep the lights on, let alone advance their priorities, Congress has an ongoing say in what the government is doing. If it doesn’t like a new program or regulation, it can deny funds to implement it—or threaten to do so unless the president makes changes.
This congressional check on executive policy is particularly important today. Over time, Congress has conferred broad authorities on federal agencies, and presidents have claimed broad powers in areas including foreign affairs and the use of military force.
As a result, presidents can and often do launch major initiatives on their own, and they have real incentives to do so. These days, America’s two main parties have very different policy ideas, but neither commands majority support in the electorate. So presidents come into office with grand ambitions but no strong mandate to accomplish them. And without significant majorities in Congress, getting major legislation through the House and Senate is nearly impossible. That means presidents end up looking for ways to advance their agenda on their own—but often they still need Congress to provide the necessary funding.
In his second term, Trump has sought to upend this structure.
Starting on his first day back in office, Trump undertook a concerted campaign to wrest control over spending from Congress.
This campaign extended to all stages of the spending process and many areas of policy. The administration has sought to pause or terminate billions of dollars in foreign aid, government contracts, and research grants. It has aimed to shut down agencies, fire staff, and withhold funds from disfavored programs. In one well-known example, it fed USAID—the agency responsible for dispensing foreign aid—“into the wood chipper.” In another, it set about drastically shrinking the Department of Education, putting in doubt the department’s capacity to perform its statutory functions.
Based on purported concerns about anti-Semitism and other civil-rights violations (but without following required procedures for proving them), it suspended billions of dollars in research funding for top universities. Through this tactic, it succeeded in extracting a $221 million payment and other concessions from Columbia University.
The administration even applied a 1974 law limiting unilateral executive spending cuts in a manner that allowed it to accomplish just such cuts: By proposing late in the fiscal year that Congress cancel some $4 billion in foreign aid, it ran out the clock on the underlying appropriation without ever spending the money.
In addition to its cuts, the administration has sought spending flexibility. In its effort to reduce staff, the administration offered de facto buyouts to civil servants even though no appropriation or other statute clearly authorized them. It has shifted resources toward favored goals, employing the military to aid border enforcement and reportedly tasking FBI agents with aiding immigration enforcement. Amid the shutdown, it took this flexibility even further. It attempted to move money creatively among accounts and accepted a private donation for military salaries, while at the same time threatening further staff cuts, suspending payments for certain infrastructure projects, and seeking to halt nutrition assistance, all in an apparent effort to pressure Democrats in Congress.
Aggrieved parties have gone to court to challenge many of these actions, and sometimes they have succeeded in halting the administration’s plans, at least temporarily. But judicial remedies can do only so much in this area. Courts are good at blocking discrete unlawful actions such as illegal regulations and the detention of particular people. They are less adept at getting recalcitrant officials to do things they should be doing anyway, such as prudently dispensing billions of dollars for research or foreign aid in accordance with statutory policies.
Historically Congress, rather than the courts, has been the main check on this sort of spending abuse. Fifty years ago, President Nixon also tried “impounding,” or refusing to spend, large sums for housing assistance, environmental improvements, and other social programs. His administration claimed that the president’s “executive power” under the Constitution included the authority to withhold spending.
But Congress stood up for itself, enacting changes to the budget process including restrictions on impoundments. The 1974 Impoundment Control Act limited presidential authority even for spending “deferrals” (that is, delays). It also made clear that to “rescind” or cancel spending requires new legislation from Congress.
A few years later, President Ronald Reagan came to Washington promising to limit federal spending. But Congress protected much of the funding that his administration sought to cut. As one Texas Representative told Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, members of Congress were unwilling “to tear up [their] voting cards and become White House robots.”
In one incident, Stockman delayed certain spending in anticipation of proposed cuts, but Howard Baker, the Republican Senate majority leader, told him “this dog ain’t gonna hunt.” Baker then exploded in rage when Stockman pushed back. Recalling the discipline he received as a child, Stockman wrote that Baker’s outburst “stung as much as my father’s leather strap.” The administration backed down.
Today, the Trump administration is singing from Nixon’s hymnal—and succeeding in ways Nixon and Reagan could not. Echoing Nixon’s claims, Trump pledged during last year’s campaign that, if reelected, he would revive a presidential impoundment power as a way “to cut waste, stop inflation, and crush the Deep State.” In 2022, Russell Vought, who has since taken on Stockman’s role as Trump’s budget director, criticized the influence of “congressional appropriations committees” over federal agencies and advocated a “Radical Constitutionalism” including stronger presidential power over the executive branch.
Trump and Vought have acted on these views in office, and Congress so far has given them little effective resistance. As is so often the case in this time of all-out partisanship, Republican majorities in Congress have seemed more interested in protecting their party’s president than in defending their branch of government. Meanwhile, Democrats have done the reverse and resisted the president however they can, voting nearly in lockstep against administration proposals.
The Democrats even triggered the government shutdown by failing to vote for new spending. Yet in doing so, they focused their objections on a policy disagreement over health-care subsidies rather than on Congress’s institutional interest in preserving its power of the purse. Each side has focused on the interests of its political party rather than its branch of government.
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The practical effect has been to give the executive branch more latitude to do what it wants. Trump does not have stronger political support than Nixon or Reagan. Quite the opposite: Whereas both of those presidents won reelection in historic landslides, Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and squeaked by with a plurality in 2024. But Congress today is more partisan and divided and therefore less able to defend its constitutional authorities. Vought is not likely to feel “stung” by anything Congress does.
What does all of this mean for the future? In principle, presidents will still need Congress to provide new funding each year. But if they can impound funds, cancel past grants, move money between accounts, and impose new conditions as Trump has, then Congress will have much less leverage over how those funds are spent.
And while Republicans are riding high right now, it is not hard to imagine a Democratic president acting just as unilaterally. Much as Trump has canceled foreign aid, gutted the Education Department, and required universities to abandon diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, a Democratic president might impound local police funding, limit immigration enforcement, and require universities to resume DEI.
Presidential defiance of Congress seems likely to become self-reinforcing. If legislators can get what they want out of the president, why take tough votes or make compromises with the other side? And if legislators opposed to the president know he can cancel items they like, why help him out with votes for an overall package? Unilateral presidential control over spending may compound Congress’s partisan gridlock, giving presidents still more freedom to defy Congress in the future.
Elections, of course, have consequences, and presidents should advance the preferences of their voters. But the United States is a big, complicated place. In designing the Constitution, the Framers made a bet that negotiation between competing interests in Congress, and between Congress and the executive branch, would generally produce better and more durable policy than hinging everything on nationwide elections every four years. Given recent presidents’ flip-flopping between polarized, unpopular policies, the Framers’ bet looks better than ever—if only the system they designed can deliver on it.
