What did Donald Trump do today?
He said he'd just pick and choose who and what the government spends money on, and never mind appropriations.
Trump made two alarming claims about the ongoing government shutdown today, both of them false. The first was that he'd fund the WIC program out of revenue raised from tariffs—but there is no WIC funding until money is appropriated to it. Currently, Congress has failed to pass an appropriations bill due to Trump's insistence that health insurance subsidies for about 25 million Americans be zeroed out, which will double or even triple the cost of premiums in some parts of the country.
On a related matter, Trump was asked about back pay for federal workers furloughed (or simply required to work without pay) during the shutdown. He replied that he'd decided who he'd "take care of" on an individual basis, adding, "There are some [government workers] that really don’t deserve to be taken care of. And we’ll take care of them in a different way."
Of course, it doesn't work that way—at all. If it did, there would be no budget shutdown in the first place: Trump could simply decree that Affordable Care Act tax credits don't exist, instead of trying and (so far) failing to get a bill through Congress saying that they don't. For that matter, there wouldn't be any need for appropriations at all: just Trump, the Treasury, and whatever he wanted to spend taxpayers' money on.
But in the real world, there are two legal issues with Trump's threat. The first is a law passed during the last Trump shutdown in 2019 that guarantees back pay to all government workers affected by it. The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act (or GEFTA) requires that federal employees who are
furloughed as a result of a covered lapse in appropriations shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations, and each excepted employee who is required to perform work during a covered lapse in appropriations shall be paid for such work, at the employee’s standard rate of pay, at the earliest date possible after the lapse in appropriations ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates.
The Trump administration has abruptly removed legal guidance informing departments of their obligation to pay government workers currently going without pay.
The other reason Trump can't simply pick and choose who gets paid or what government programs get funded is the Constitution, which is very clear that appropriations are a matter of law and not presidential whim:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
Why does this matter?
- No matter how many times he needs to be reminded of it, Trump is not a king.
- Laws don't cease to exist just because they're inconvenient for a president.
- Neither does the Constitution.