White House eyes fight to expand Trump’s power to control spending
"President Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a landmark confrontation over his authority to strike federal spending and regulation, as the White House looks to reconfigure vast swaths of the U.S. government even without approval from Congress.
Only days into his second term, Trump’s extraordinary steps have challenged a fundamental principle of the Constitution: control over the power of the purse, which the president has looked to partly wrest away from lawmakers so that he can shape the federal budget as he wishes.
Already, Trump’s actions have triggered significant legal clashes. In one case, lawyers with the Justice Department on Thursday defended Trump’s ability to “lawfully direct agencies to implement the president’s agenda,” describing a pause in the disbursement of federal funds as “commonplace.”
Separately, infuriated Democrats tried Thursday to block Trump’s selection to lead the White House budget office — Russell Vought — from proceeding to a full Senate confirmation vote. Vought, who has embraced Trump’s aggressive strategy, overcame a brief uprising after Republicans voted to advance his nomination out of committee, foreshadowing the high-stakes budget battles still to come.
Trump moved to reshape federal spending almost immediately after his inauguration with executive orders that halted investments in green energy, aid to foreign nations and money to promote racial equity, describing all of it as wasteful. On Monday, the White House then broadened its spending pause, holding up trillions of dollars across thousands of federal programs — and igniting a court battle that forced the administration to rescind its directive.
But Trump’s previous spending prohibitions remained in place, while his aides signaled the controversial memo was no aberration for a president who has sought novel ways to push the limits of his office. Illustrating their ambitions, a 13-slide presentation about spending, “regulatory misalignment” and the federal workforce began circulating in the White House budget office and other federal agencies in recent days — though a Trump spokeswoman insisted the president’s appointees did not write it.
The presentation, obtained by The Washington Post and other news outlets, outlines in new detail how the White House could revive an obscure and controversial power known as impoundment, potentially allowing Trump to cancel federal funds as he sees fit.
Under a law enacted in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the president may invoke that authority only in limited cases with clear notice to Congress. But the slide deck suggests Trump officials may seek to trigger a court case that could declare that law unconstitutional, ultimately enabling Trump to reduce or eliminate entire funding categories on his own.
“Trump officials have never seen this document before and it’s pretty apparent it was generated before Trump was in office,” Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement.
The document references Trump’s recent executive orders by number. And it aligns with Trump’s own past pledges to embrace impoundment in a bid “to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings,” as he told voters in a campaign video in 2023. Vought has echoed those views as he seeks confirmation to lead OMB — telling lawmakers at one point this month that the administration would conduct a legal review on the cost-cutting authority.
In the meantime, legal experts said the flurry of activity raised the odds of a high-stakes constitutional confrontation at the Supreme Court, with the potential to shift the balance of power laid out in Article I of the Constitution in which Congress, not the president, possesses the primary authority to tax, spend and manage the nation’s complex finances.
“What is at stake is the most important structural foundation of our federal government, which is the separation of powers,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, adding that the power of the purse “is how Congress represents us.”
In pursuing potentially trillions of dollars in spending cuts, Trump hopes to rein in federal spending and reduce the growing national debt, which now exceeds $36 trillion. But reality is more complicated: Some of the cuts he seeks are necessary to generate savings to pay for his policy agenda, including an extension of soon-expiring tax cuts that could cost in excess of $4 trillion.
Other spending reductions reflect Trump’s longtime political grievances, particularly his objection to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI, as well as his aversion to policies enacted by his predecessor. That includes money for green energy programs signed into law by President Joe Biden, which remain halted this week even after the administration rescinded its freeze.
“In the coming weeks and months, more executive action will continue to end the egregious waste of federal funding,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday, after the administration rescinded its memo.
Fearing Trump might continue to clamp down on spending, opponents have continued to petition courts around the country to limit any future effort to freeze federal programs.
On Thursday, roughly two dozen state attorneys general asked a judge in Rhode Island to prevent the White House from instituting any “pause, freeze, impediment, block, cancellation, or termination” of federal funds. In their request for an injunction, the Democratic officials specifically pointed to the “continued implementation identified by the White House Press Secretary” in her past statement.
Another collection of plaintiffs represented by Democracy Forward, a left-leaning group, similarly pressed ahead with its case after the Trump administration pulled back on some of its spending restraints. Citing that, the Justice Department asked a federal judge in D.C. to dismiss the case on Thursday, arguing that the plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate harm by any interruption in federal aid.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democrats blasted Trump for seeking to circumvent the congressional budget process, calling it an unconstitutional overreach. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) led Democrats in what they described as a boycott of Vought’s nomination to lead OMB, promising the party would try to hold up his confirmation “until he gives the American people more answers” about his views on impoundment.
Republicans, however, forged ahead anyway: They mustered their own votes in the Senate Budget Committee to approve Vought for consideration by the full Senate in the coming days. Publicly, many GOP lawmakers have sided with the White House on the question of impoundment, though privately, some Republicans have expressed alarm about the president’s claim to greater power to revoke spending that they’ve previously approved.
“We promised to reduce the size and scope of government, and there’s been so much action on that, that it’s caused controversy,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said. “That’s a good thing. We’re disrupting.”
Some of Trump’s early actions resemble plans detailed in the OMB presentation that has circulated widely in Washington, which offers a blueprint for the administration to claim even more authority over spending. It proposes that Trump could “attempt to restore impoundment authority by challenging the ICA’s constitutionality in court,” referring to the Impoundment Control Act, the 1974 law that limits how the president can refuse to spend funds that Congress appropriates.
The OMB document portrays reclaiming the impoundment power as part of a broader shift to address “regulatory misalignment,” including an agency-by-agency effort to delete regulations seen as overreaching, citing a recent Supreme Court case that weakened federal rulemaking powers. The slide deck says the administration could “encourage the exploration of untested statutory pathways for deregulation and policy innovation.”
The campaign to lay the political and legal groundwork for impoundment began in Trump’s first term: Vought, who served as Trump’s first OMB director, and Mark Paoletta, who worked then as OMB general counsel and has returned to that role, argued in a January 2021 memo that existing law “limits the Executive Branch’s ability to spend appropriations effectively.”
Soon after departing government, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a conservative advocacy group that champions austerity and Christian values. Paoletta, who joined him at the organization, argued again in a paper last June that limits to a president’s spending powers represent “an unprecedented break with the Nation’s constitutional history and traditions.”
Since his renomination, Vought has offered few specifics as to how Trump might approach the impoundment laws. During a confirmation hearing held before OMB’s spending freeze, Vought told lawmakers that the White House would also “go through a review with our lawyers, if confirmed, including the Department of Justice, to explore the parameters of the law with regard to the Impoundment Control Act”
“He hasn’t developed a strategy he’s announced,” Vought added.
Jacob Bogage contributed to this report."
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