Since January 20, the Trump Administration has been cutting federal spending. The thing is that, once Congress appropriates funds and the President signs those appropriations into law (which President Trump did on March 15), the Executive Branch can’t just refuse to spend the funds. Such a refusal is called impoundment, and there’s a law to prevent it. Now the Trump Administration may seek to make those cuts legal through a process that can’t be blocked by the Senate filibuster.
On April 14, the New York Post reported that the Trump Administration will make a “rescission request” to Congress to permanently decrease funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds a small portion of PBS on TV and NPR on the radio, USAID, and a few other agencies.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed after President Nixon made several attempts to control policy by refusing to spend appropriated funds, codifies that the appropriations power — how much agencies are to spend — belongs to Congress and not the President, as the Constitution says.
“No officer or employee of the United States may defer any budget authority” (2 U.S. Code § 684(b))
There are exceptions to Congress’s power over appropriations, of which one is rescission. The key to the exception, though, is that Congress must approve it.
But so far the Trump Administration has bypassed Congress in its efforts to decrease the size of the federal government. Examples include requiring agencies cut their staff, refusing to authorize grant money that’s already been awarded, attempting to reorganize agencies, and in some cases like with USAID and IMLS, all of these at once. Without a Congressionally-approved rescission, permanent cuts like this are illegal. (And that’s not even considering the separate laws that require the existence of these agencies and their functions.)
One outcome of the Trump Administration’s impoundments has been a flood of lawsuits against the administration. The cases are all still winding through the legal system and there have been mixed results. For example, the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace has largely gone forward as described in this Wired article. Included in the takeover was the firing of most of the staff and seizing the Institute’s building and all of its contents.
There hasn’t been any direct response from the Republicans in either chamber of Congress. As President Trump signed the Continuing Resolution into law last month that set federal spending levels for the rest of the fiscal year, he announced that he intended to ignore it and cut further. When the separate budget resolution passed, which sets spending/cutting targets for the coming Republican reconciliation bill, the last few House Republican holdouts were convinced to vote for it because they received assurances still more spending would be cut.
