How things work in the American system is like this: the Congress controls the money. The president spends the money, as directed by the Congress. And the courts make sure everyone obeys the law.
Donald Trump did something this week that could upend all of that, to put it extremely mildly, turning everything that we believe to be true about how things work in the American system into irrelevancy.
The White House issued a directive this week that orders a “pause” to all grants and loans that are dispersed by the federal government.
This is as profound as it is simple. If money is the blood keeping the body politic alive, Trump tightened his grip on the heart pumping it.
According to the Post, experts say that “the memo as written was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions,” such as:
NBC news reported that other frozen programs include:
Reuters reported that it was unclear whether Medicaid would be affected by the order. At a cost of $618 billion, and serving 80 million Americans, it is “by far the government's largest grant program.”
But reporting by the Connecticut Post and other regional outlets confirmed that it has been. The Postreported that despite assurances by the White House, Medicaid payments have stopped in Connecticut.
Oregon’s US Senator Ron Wyden said: “My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night's federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health care from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.”
The Prospect’s David Dayen went into greater detail. He said the order piggy-backed on another “Day One” executive order that ended the “disbursement of so-called ‘Green New Deal’ funding under the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.”
That alone is hundreds of billions of dollars.
Dayen went on:
It continued with a pause on research grants at the National Institutes of Health and a pause on foreign aid, including the wildly successful bipartisan funding program treating AIDS in Africa, which has saved an estimated 25 million lives, and initiatives interdicting drugs coming in from Colombia. (Military funding for Israel and Egypt is exempted, making this a conscious choice rather than an across-the-board hiatus.) And now, as Marisa Kabas first reported, all federal grants and loans have been paused in a memo from Matthew Vaeth, the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget.
The pause would include student loan payments to universities, grants for basic research, grants to state and local governments for a wide variety of purposes, and much more. The OMB memo claims that Social Security and Medicare benefits are exempted by the order, as well as grants delivered specifically to individuals, like Pell grants or veterans’ benefits.”
Altogether, we could be talking about as much as $3 trillion.
The White House would like us to believe this move is within the realm of normal politics. All it wants to do is review grants and loans, and make sure they are in keeping with the president’s policy priorities.
The president’s policy priorities are beside the point. The point is the law. The administration is bound by federal statute, legislation and court precedent to disperse appreciations as directed by the Congress.
This is not an opinion.
“There is simply no plausible argument that the president has the constitutional authority to refuse to spend appropriated funds because he doesn’t like how the money is spent,” said Josh Chafetz, who wrote the bible on legislative authority, Congress’s Constitution. “The legality of policy impoundments is just not a close question.”
“It's hard to think of anything more destructive of our constitutional order than a claim that a president can either spend funds that have not been appropriated or refuse to spend funds that have,” he said.
Destruction to the constitutional order gets a lot of hype, but this is the real thing. Trump is trying to take away from the Congress the most important power given by the founders, “the power of the purse.”
The whole point of giving a body representing the people that sole power was to put a check on the sole power of the executive, “the power of the sword.” Separate “the purse” and “the sword,” Hamilton said, and there would be no danger of a president becoming a king.
This is why Trump’s order is potentially destructive. As Dayen said: “It is designed to pick a fight over spending, and relies on fanciful theories that would render Congress a vestigial organ in the governmental order. It means to nullify the congressional spending power by presidential fiat. And it hopes to spark litigation whereby the judiciary assents to that transfer of power, emasculating itself in the process.”
I would put this another way and take it another step.
Another way: the president wants to rob the US Congress of its authority with the blessing of five justices on the US Supreme Court.
Another step: if those five justices agree, and say that he can rob the Congress of its authority, Trump will be free to dismiss the Congress entirely. Impeach him. Put him on trial. “Remove” him. Ha!
Meanwhile, no one could ever sue the president, at least not with the expectation that he recognize any authority that’s higher than his own.
He could dismiss the states, too. Indeed, the entire concept of federalism – state sovereignty, another separation of powers – would be moot with a president who can do no wrong. He could extract wealth from blue states while starving them. To get funding, they’d have to play ball. Those are conditions in which blue states turn red.
If a president can ignore the Congress, the courts, the states and the law, what is he? Not a legitimate president, that’s for sure. If he is a president, he’s a criminal president, as he stands outside and above everything. Public opinion could turn, but it won’t matter to him. At the end of his term, he could run again, or more likely, refuse to leave.
“How things work” won’t be how things work anymore.
I don’t know where we go from here.
The Congress could reassert its authority. Under Republican control, however, that’s unlikely. All the Democrats can do is raise as much hell as possible in order to influence the thinking of the five Republican justices on the high court, which will hear a challenge at some point.
"This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family," Chuck Schumer said. He told reporters that he and his Democratic colleagues are getting a "deluge" of calls from constituents who are panicking. "This decision is lawless, dangerous, destructive, cruel. It's illegal, it's unconstitutional,” he said. “Plain and simple, this is Project 2025."
Chris Murphy, my senator, said Trump is seizing power. “This is what a king does," he said. "This is not how a democracy works. One man does not decide how taxpayers' money is spent." Dick Blumenthal, my other senator, said it was a “reckless, lawless, harmful, dictatorial order.”
But if five justices say OK, that’s the end of the republic.
Maybe I’m wrong?
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