Thomas Jefferson won the Presidency in 1800 in an upset election over incumbent John Adams that upended the financial and political establishment. He immediately repealed the Alien and Sedition Acts that stood in violation of the First Amendment, and embarked on a political journey to entrench the Jeffersonian vision of limited government and freedom for all.
In the midst of this, there were some serious challenges, starting with the controversy over the Barbary Pirates, which caused Jefferson to temporarily set aside his non-interventionist principles. Then came the issue of the Louisiana Purchase, which went much more smoothly than anyone had anticipated. There was also the problem of the federal budget, which was still in deep debt from the war.
“The sum of fifty thousand Dollars, appropriated by Congress for providing gunboats, remains unexpended. The favorable & peaceable turn of affairs, on the Mississippi, rendered an immediate execution of that law unnecessary; & time was desirable, in order that the institution of that branch of our force might begin on models the most approved by experience. The same issue of events dispensed with a resort to the appropriation of a million & a half of dollars, contemplated for purposes which were effected by happier means.”
In other words, from Jefferson’s point of view, it’s fine for Congress to appropriate money but the spending of it by the executive branch is ultimately at the discretion of the president. No one really questioned this. He was behaving as the president.
As the chief executive, what happens under the executive branch is ultimately the responsibility of the president elected by the people. Congress can authorize spending but it is ultimately up to the president on whether and to what extent the checks are actually written. This is because it is he who bears final responsibility.
Let’s say you have a son in college. You have authorized $2,000 a month to be spent on rent and food and books. Does this mean that your son must spend the money? Of course not. If he is behaving responsibly, and he finds a cheaper apartment or finds books to download for free, you would be thrilled to see that he has declined to spend the sum you have allocated. This is simply behaving in accordance with the idea of frugality and accountability.
American presidents have long assumed the right to impound funds that Congress has allocated if they are inconsistent with policy priorities. This power has been exercised by, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. The doctrine of impoundment is not mentioned in the Constitution, but it has never been struck down in general by the courts. Nixon’s impoundments were challenged but the court decision against the practice was narrow and not broad.
For that matter, the idea of a line-item veto is itself a form of impoundment. It permits the president to look at an entire bill and strike out that with which he disagrees, while allowing the rest to go through. Again, this is just common sense, consistent with the division of powers and checks and balances. Congress is not the executive but merely the permissioner of the executive. Permissions are not mandates.
He writes that “Presidents James Buchanan and Ulysses S. Grant were among the nineteenth century presidents who impounded funds, and they did so in a domestic policy context. In 1860, President Buchanan impounded funds appropriated for Illinois post offices to punish the representatives of the state. In 1876, President Grant impounded part of an appropriation bill for river and harbor improvements.”
Bale’s article includes a chart detailing many dozens of cases of impoundments throughout the whole of American history. As government grew and executive authority expanded, so did the use of the impoundment power, all tracing to the “Take Care” clause of the Constitution.
Essentially, the president is charged with being the best-possible custodian of taxpayer funds, and their mere allocation by Congress does not cause that responsibility to disappear.
“At the direction of President Trump, the Office of Management and Budget has worked diligently to identify wasteful and unnecessary spending already approved by Congress. On Tuesday, President Trump will send Congress a $15.4 billion rescissions request, the largest ever using this authority.
“While this authority hasn’t been used in nearly two decades, every president from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton successfully rescinded funds. From 1974 to 2000, approximately 40 percent of presidential rescission proposals were enacted in some form. Members of Congress in both parties have supported rescissions packages similar to the one President Trump is proposing.”
That effort kicked off a huge fight, and alerted the Trump administration that it desperately had to gain control of the spending spigot if it ever stood a chance of realizing its drain-the-swamp efforts. The first term failed in this respect but they have now had four years to map out a better strategy. The sudden impoundments that have happened in the first two weeks of Trump 2.0 represent exactly these efforts.
The people have cheered as Trump has used his power to gain command of out-of-control spending. If not the president, who?
Will the president’s action pass Constitutional muster? The existing record of precedent on this is mixed, though it leans toward authorizing impoundment on matters of national security and foreign policy. It is far less clear on domestic policy. Still, in the end, we have to take recourse to good sense when the words of the Constitution are somewhat unclear.
For many decades, Congress has authorized the spending of money that government does not have. This has necessitated the creation of debt by the U.S. Treasury. That debt is then purchased as part of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet that is truly unsustainable and results in inflation that has so seriously harmed household finances.
If we are ever to get control of the budget, it is likely to happen because the president has taken his responsibilities seriously.
That is what is happening. To return to the earlier analogy, if you send your kid off to college with a spending limit that he is forever blowing past, what precisely are you to do? In the end, every parent knows the answer. You cut off the credit card. You might even have to take him out of college and send him to work, welcoming him to the real world.
The real world is precisely what Congress needs to greet now, and the same is true for the whole of all 450-ish federal agencies and all their beneficiaries. Now is the time. If the Trump administration cannot pull this off, we might never have another chance. It’s time for the maximum use of the impoundment power in every aspect of government.
If and when Congress can send President Trump a budget that is reasonable, frugal, and consistent with the policy priorities of the American people, Trump will surely acquiesce to the allocations. Until then, the president has every right to be a scrupulous guardian of the public purse.
Thomas Jefferson himself looks down from heaven and smiles with approval.
