What did Donald Trump do today?
He said he gets to spend money on whatever he wants without permission from Congress.
Trump's latest government shutdown began its third week today. Hundreds of thousands of government employees, some furloughed during the budget impasse and some still required to work, missed a paycheck today. American military servicemembers were expected to be among them, but today Trump issued a memo asserting that he had the authority to spend any money left in the Treasury to make sure military paychecks went out.
The problem, of course, is that Trump has no legal authority to spend any money not authorized by Congress—and Trump himself is the reason Congress can't pass a bill to cover military paychecks. Paying the troops is politically popular, and a stopgap appropriations bill for just that purpose would have easily won passage in Congress. In fact, both Democrats and at least one Republican have tried to introduce legislation to that effect.
But Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, acting on Trump's orders, has adjourned the House for weeks, meaning no such bill can be passed. (In a sign of how nested the toxicity of Trump's second term has become, part of Johnson's political calculus is that bringing the House back into session would also trigger a humiliating bipartisan defeat in Trump's attempt to keep the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files away from public view.)
In a mirror image to his demand to spend money without oversight, Trump also today claimed he was allowed to not spend money that Congress had appropriated—something he's already put into practice to punish Americans who live in places with Democratic elected officials. Speaking today about a new tunnel project for the greater New York City area, Trump claimed he'd "terminated" it (which he has no authority to do), and said:
You know, we're getting rid of problems that we didn't like, but that were negotiated in, but we didn't like. We're terminating those programs. And they're gonna be terminated on a permanent basis. And it's thousands of people, it's—it's—you know, billions of dollars. We're getting rid of a lot of things that we never wanted, because of the fact that they made this stupid move.
Trump, whose party controls both houses of Congress, has shut down the government over his refusal to sign an appropriations bill that includes subsidies for Americans' health care. Without those subsidies, people with individual health insurance plans will see their premiums double or triple in cost. But what Trump is signaling by spending money he doesn't have permission to spend and withholding money he doesn't have permission to withhold is that appropriations bills are meaningless in the first place—and that neither Democrats nor Republicans have anything to gain by negotiating with him.
Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States requires that "no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law."
Why does this matter?
- Presidents are not kings and the Constitution is not a recommendation.
- A president who actually wanted to pay the troops would probably let Congress send him a bill to pay the troops.