The director of the Office of Management and Budget is infuriating Republican lawmakers by “going rogue” on what appropriations were approved by the House and Senate.
MS NOW’s Hayes Brown wrote on Monday that Director Russell Vought has made a unilateral decision to control whether funds are actually sent out for projects that Congress approved.
The constitutional core is Article I’s Appropriations Clause: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” So, the president can’t legally spend Treasury money unless Congress has authorized it through law. Appropriations are technically laws approved by Congress. The president’s Article II powers mandate that he “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
But the executive branch is refusing to disburse the funds approved by law. In fact, Brown explained that “Vought has used every lever he can reach to stanch the flow of federal dollars.”
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Constitutional Crisis as a Service /s
I hate this timeline. We must survive. Right?
Yes, we’ll survive. Except for all those who don’t (millions so far, between COVID, ending of USAID, ICE, attacks on Venezuela and Iran, etc.).
Alex Pretti
Renee Good
❤️🩹
Thank you for sharing those two names and happy cake day.
There is no crisis. It’s a gap in our framework.
There isn’t a law that says the Executive must spend the money Congress approved. The intent is, if the Executive is doing a poor job, the People will vote him/her out.
The People are the problem (because of a decades long assault on education and a concerted brainwashing campaign by the oligarchy).
The idiots that are us only have limited options years apart. For day to day issues, it is mainly Congress who can serve as a check to executive overreach. They are the failure. Most of the overreach is the executive branch stealing congressional authority and they don’t seem to care
It’s also not necessarily a bad thing to have an executive not spend money Congress approved. While many likely disagree with how that discretion is being used, it’s not bad that it exists.
You’re assuming the executive branch in its infinite wisdom knows better what we all want than Congress? I completely disagree. While I disagree with a lot of what Congress does, the consensus approach is less likely to lead to abuse
I’m assuming that it’s a check against Congress just appropriating absurdly large sums for pet projects or for securing donations. The job of the executive is not to blindly follow Congress, but it’s also not to fight everything Congress wants.
The responsibilities of each branch, the checks and balances, are well defined on both sides. Going off script is almost by definition an abuse of power
It’s not off script. Not spending a billion dollars on Capitol landscaping even if Congress appropriated that much wouldn’t be faithfully executing the laws.
In a perfect world maybe. In today’s world where the executive has stolen and consolidated huge amounts of power, it’s just another way to bypass Congress’s intent and purpose,.
Congress has the power to impeach an executive not doing what they want. It’s not limited to just the president. They are happier to just complain than use their powers though.
Exactly this, we don’t need to legislate our way out of a problem that already has a solution.
The people are the problem because the real problem is something else? What a stupid statement.
Oh yeah- always stupid to peel back the layers of causation. What an intelligent statement and addition to the conversation!
That’s the most pathetic description of victim blaming I’ve heard yet.