The 50-Year-Old Law Trump Is Challenging To Create Chaos
HuffPost
Richard Nixon tried the same thing Donald Trump is trying in not spending money Congress has already approved. It did not end well.
In July 1974, then-President Richard Nixon, weakened by the Watergate scandal and only weeks away from becoming the first president to resign, signed the innocuously titled “Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act.”
He didn’t have much of a choice: The bipartisan bill passed the Senate 80 to 0 and 386 to 23 in the House.
More than 50 years later, though, that decision is still reverberating through Washington after President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo late Monday night asking agencies to identify all forms of “federal financial assistance” through grants and loans and pause them while the administration reviews them.
That was exactly what the 1974 law, which also created the Congressional Budget Office, was supposed to prevent, critics of the Trump administration say.
The law was meant to keep the White House from picking and choosing what programs it wanted to fund over what programs Congress had funded, with its “power of the purse” appropriations authority in the U.S. Constitution.
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Richard Nixon tried the same thing Donald Trump is trying in not spending money Congress has already approved. It did not end well.