In Year 2 Of Trump’s Funding Grab, Congress Fights Back

Republican lawmakers are still locked in a power struggle with the White House over control of federal cash, long since President Donald Trump swept back into office with unprecedented orders undermining Congress’ power of the purse.

Earlier this month, GOP senators overwhelmingly agreed to a bipartisan government funding bill that would temporarily block the Trump administration from finalizing a federal rule to let political appointees steer money toward grants “aligned with the president’s agenda.” The House could clear that bill next month, and Trump is expected to sign it to avert a shutdown before the midterms.

And while the days of widespread funding freezes might be over, the Trump administration continues to create new rules for federal grants and then deny funding based on them — only to be repeatedly shot down in court this summer.

Lawmakers in both parties have also blasted White House budget director Russ Vought this year for delaying the release of cash for congressionally backed programs for antipoverty services, foreign assistance, banking in underserved areas and more.

“Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) chastised Vought this spring over the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars the Trump administration is supposed to send quarterly to states.

Now Republicans are watching for clues about whether Vought, between now and Sept. 30, will claim the authority to nix appropriations in the final weeks of the fiscal year through what’s known as a pocket recession. He used the move last year to unilaterally cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid through the legally dubious maneuver.

“Pocket rescissions would be a very interesting way to curry favor with the legislative branch — especially the one part of the legislative branch which has delivered on all of the administration's shit,” Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, a senior Republican appropriator, said in a recent interview.

Indeed, the White House needs the support of GOP appropriators in both chambers to advance Trump administration priorities.

Those top lawmakers have already taken some modest steps to stop the White House from shirking Congress’ intent on spending by inserting stricter language into bipartisan funding bills Trump signed into law for the current fiscal year. That included new rules for shifting money between accounts and more explicit instructions for how dollars should be spent.

Some Republican lawmakers have also been resisting the administration’s push this summer to enact billions of dollars for the military and agriculture programs through another party-line budget reconciliation package. Top House Republican appropriators slammed the White House in June for pursuing a “risky and uncoordinated” strategy to enact funding for the Iran war through a party-line bill that’s not guaranteed to pass.

Relying on the reconciliation process to skirt the Senate filibuster is a key step to achieve the "paradigm shift” Vought has touted throughout Trump’s second term, designed to make funding negotiations “less bipartisan” so Republicans don’t have to agree to nondefense increases in order to get enough votes to boost military budgets.

“At what point did we stop legislating?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), another senior appropriator, said last month after Vought privately pitched Senate Republicans on the latest party-line plan, which would inherently take funding power away from the appropriations committees.

Murkowski was also among the Senate Republicans who chided the White House for not seeking input from lawmakers before forging ahead with its plan to put political appointees in charge of approving federal grants and minimize the role of the objective peer-review process for selecting recipients of those dollars.

“There was no consultation at all,” she said. “When you start issuing grants based on political connections, that’s not good for the system here.”

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) publicly called on Vought to extend the public comment period for the plan last month, to no avail.

She also continues to pan the pocket rescission gambit, saying in a recent interview that the administration should “go through the proper process with the Appropriations Committee” if it wants to rescind money intended for a specific program.

Under a decades-old law, the White House is allowed to send Congress a request to revoke funding, then withhold the cash for 45 days while lawmakers consider whether to approve, reject or ignore the proposal. Republicans last summer voted to approve Trump’s request to rescind $9 billion for public media and foreign assistance.

Then Trump used that same law weeks later to send Congress a request to rescind $4.9 billion in foreign aid — this time with less than 45 days left before the end of the fiscal year. Vought immediately declared the funding canceled, arguing that the administration had to withhold the funding until it expired at the end of September, regardless of congressional action.

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment on whether the White House plans to execute new pocket rescissions in the coming weeks. But Trump’s new pick for deputy director at the agency, Hal Duncan, told lawmakers this summer that the agency isn’t ruling out any “fiscal tools.”

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said White House officials have given him no assurances that they won’t deploy the tactic again this year and that his reaction would hinge on the type of funding eliminated.

“It would depend on what it is — it really would,” the Oklahoma Republican said last month.

In courtrooms throughout the country, federal judges continue to weigh in on whether Trump is illegally encroaching on Congress’ funding power.

Last month a federal judge declared that the administration can’t cancel grants based on new rules or goals established after the fact. The Trump administration later admitted in a different case that it canceled $7.6 billion “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” Then a federal judge halted changes to teen-pregnancy prevention grants, concluding that it’s unlawful “to impose conditions … that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained.”

The Supreme Court has yet to conclusively rule on the president’s spending tactics, and many Democrats on Capitol Hill argue Republicans shouldn’t rely on the courts to defend Congress’ authority. GOP leaders have repeatedly bucked Democratic calls for action, including to reverse the cancellation of specific grants, nullify Trump’s pocket rescission last fall and head off a future end-run around Congress by barring rescissions requests in the last months of the fiscal year.

“When are our Republican colleagues going to assert our legislative authority?” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a top appropriator, said in an interview. “I mean, why in the hell did they run for Congress?”

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a senior appropriator in line to be the No. 2 Democrat in the next Congress, was more charitable.

“I just think there's a bipartisan desire to get back to the way the Constitution is supposed to operate,” he said in an interview, “where we decide how the money is spent.”