Opinion | Why Trump’s Power Grab On Spending Was So Radical

Every president tests the limits of their authority. Yet no opening presidential bid for power compares to President Donald Trump’s out-of-the-blue freeze of federal funds across the government.

Much about the initial memo from Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which has since been rescinded, was unclear — including the scope or duration of the “temporary” pause on “all federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities.” Most importantly, the memo identified no source of constitutional or legislative authority for the president to pause any, let alone all, domestic grant programs.

But it is animated, at least implicitly, by a striking claim: Not only can the president freeze all funding amid a review, but he must also then be permitted to permanently eliminate items from appropriations statutes at a whim. It’s a move that threatens not only a radical curtailment of Congress’ authority but imperils the separation of American civil society from the partisan tides of the White House.

And it goes far beyond what previous presidents have done during contentious displays of executive authority.

Take former President George W. Bush’s “signing statements,” when he added language saying he believed certain provisions of the laws infringed on his constitutional authority. Or former President Barack Obama’s sweeping orders granting immigration relief under DACA and DAPA. In both of those instances, a president took targeted aim at a particular question of federal law. Neither were blunderbuss assaults on federal operations as a whole. Signing statements, moreover, did not in themselves prevent laws from being enforced. And Obama-era immigration relief was founded on an interpretation of federal law — not a brazen decision to set it aside.

There is also a breathtaking discontinuity between the reasons for the funding “pause” and its reach. The OMB memo points to the never-enacted “Green New Deal” and to a “Marxist” agenda that is a figment of the MAGA imagination. Even reading the memo charitably, it defies belief to think that the billions of federal funding to states, hospitals, social services, law enforcement and educational bodies plausibly raise these concerns.

Neither the signing statements nor executive orders of earlier administrations resemble this devil-may-care attitude toward federal laws. Neither implies the president has the open-ended authority to single out, for any reason or no reason, a congressionally mandated fund — and to nix it.

Rather than cite legal authority for these claims, the OMB memo points to Trump’s “mandate.” That’s a usefully slippery word for the White House. It is also cover for the absence of plausible constitutional or statutory authority for its power grab. It’s no surprise that a judge blocked the funding freeze, at least for now. And after a huge backlash, the administration rescinded the memo — setting the gambit aside, at least for now.

The Constitution’s text is clear that Congress must authorize appropriations and the president must “take Care” that those laws are “faithfully executed.” There is no basis in constitutional text or history for the president to claim open-ended power to impound funds in the manner of the OMB memo. In 1975, the Supreme Court rejected former President Richard Nixon’s claim to be able to spend less than Congress had appropriated. That ruling would have had to come out the other way if the president had a constitutional power to impound. (Perhaps aware of this reality, OMB issued a later memo claiming the freeze was not, in fact, an “impoundment.” But this is just a semantic sleight of hand: For entities that need federal funds this or next week in particular, there is no meaningful difference.)

Responding to Nixon’s impoundments, Congress enacted the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment and Control Act. This picks out specific circumstances in which the impoundment of funds is lawful. None apply here. All require the president to expressly and immediately notify Congress. The OMB memo violates the terms of the 1974 law by asserting a power that Congress did not delegate.

If anything, the Supreme Court has tightened the constitutional leash on such unilateral claims of executive authority untethered from a statutory anchor. With Justice Neil Gorsuch leading the charge, it has stressed instead the need for clear authority from Congress for the exercise of any delegated power, including the power to write regulations. The OMB memo makes a mockery of those decisions by allowing the president to do with money what now isn’t allowed with regulations.

It is true that there is a scattering of past instances of impoundment. But these isolated cases largely concern foreign affairs and national security matters. In 1803, for example, Thomas Jefferson declined to spend funds for 15 gunboats for fear that they would upend secret talks with a foreign sovereign, Napoleonic France. Whatever unilateral presidential authority exists over foreign affairs cannot constitutionally be spread with reckless abandon to cover any or all domestic spending.

Past presidents have also confronted conflicts between a legislative command and Congress’ failure to appropriate funds to execute that command. There, presidents are forced to make a choice between dueling statutory orders. Courts rarely address these conflicts. But it is striking to note that in a 2012 case involving competing mandates, the Supreme Court rejected the executive’s claim to be able to withhold promised funds.

The other, rare cases of impoundment are a warning, not a license. In 1860, for example, President James Buchanan impounded funds for Illinois post offices to punish the state’s representatives. He hence illustrated the risks of the abuse of impoundment — not its constitutional propriety.

There is a reason for this want of precedent: The impoundment power Trump’s White House asserts would drive a stake through Congress’ constitutional authority.

Exactly like the line-item veto invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1998, the claimed impoundment power is de facto power to selectively edit duly enacted laws. This claimed nonenforcement should elicit whiplash among conservatives. After all, it was red states such as Texas, aided by Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller, that once excoriated the Biden administration for negating federal laws on immigration via nonenforcement. (The Biden administration, however, could point to statutory conflicts that don’t exist in this case.)

It is not only Congress’s power on the line. Consider the ways in which the impoundment power claimed by the Trump White House can be weaponized against blue states and civil society.

Imagine California experiences severe wildfires in the run-up to the 2026 midterms: Could the White House withhold relief funds before the election, and then give money to solely Republican-leaning districts? Or imagine that the White House withdraws funding from every hospital in the country providing reproductive care and abortions. Or every university that conducts student voter drives.

Lest it seem that these hypotheticals are far-fetched, look at the partisan purges of the Justice Department and other agencies, and the selective withdrawals of secret-service protection from Trump’s perceived enemies.

Sometimes, Justice Antonin Scalia once said, a wolf comes in sheep’s clothing, and sometimes it just “comes as a wolf.” There is, again, a wolf at the Constitution’s door. And it needs to be recognized for what it is.