The Trump Administration's Plan to Seize Control of Spending

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Trump and his advisers want to bring back impoundment, enabling them to cancel spending appropriated by Congress.

BY DANIEL SCHUMAN JULY 19, 2024


Pundits are fixated on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but Russell Vought, the man described as Trump’s chief of staff-in-waiting, recently published an overlooked, dangerous plan that would place control of federal spending in Trump’s hands. It turns on the issue of impoundment, an outlawed practice that involves a president withholding funds appropriated by Congress. The first Trump administration attempted to use impoundment to further its agenda, and a second will not be deterred.

Here’s how impoundment in the hands of President Trump could work.

Example one: The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law contained $326 billion for transportation, including $40 billion for bridges and $8 billion for freight and highway transportation projects. Not all that money has been spent, however, and in some cases, the agencies responsible for spending the funds have not yet finalized contracts to commit those funds to a particular project. Trump could decide he doesn’t like states getting that money if they contain so-called “sanctuary cities,” because they constitute a security threat. He could subsequently order his executive branch to withhold funds from being spent in those states until they change their laws.

Example two: Public schools serve about 50 million kids and cost about $860 billion, with 10.5 percent of those funds coming from the federal government, or about $90 billion. The Trump administration could withhold funds from schools with DEI programs, or school libraries that carry books blacklisted by the administration, perhaps on the basis that they somehow embody foreign propaganda.

SNIP
Vought serves as president of the Center for Renewing America, “a far-right group operating under the aegis of the Conservative Partnership Institute,” in the words of The New Yorker. The Center is the Trump administration in exile, and the Conservative Partnership Institute is the brainchild of the far-right effort to take control of the government. To give you a taste, Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official Trump wished to make attorney general as part of his coup, and who was indicted for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, serves as the Center’s senior fellow and director of litigation.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-19-trump-administrations-plan-control-spending/