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Can Wasteful Spending be Mandatory?
In the current state of things, a normal president (i.e., almost anyone but Trump) and a normal Congress (with either party in the majority) could and would say there is just nothing we can do because the federal government is just so large, complex, specialized and wired into so many interest groups that we do not have the time or political capital to reign it in and pare it down.
It is near-miraculous that this actual reform and reduction are even being attempted. But could a lawfare campaign kill it?
In the skirmishes at the federal district court level, judge-shopping and legal ambiguities have given some small victories for the pro-waste/fraud/abuse/grift side. It is important that the proper issues get shaped for appellate review to give SCOTUS a shot at clarifying a vital constitutional issue. If it is instead only about the Trump Administration failing to touch all the bases, resulting in violating some civil service technicalities, the left could win a strategic victory by achieving a sizeable delay.
If, instead, the issue before SCOTUS is about finally delineating the constitutional powers of the executive branch with respect to the uses and non-use of appropriated funds, it could permit a rollback of the federal leviathan and a return to democratic rule. Rather than a loss of turf for Congress, this could result in more congressional control over the bureaucracies to which it has largely surrendered.
If it were expressly tested and brought before SCOTUS, I think there is a good chance the 1974 Impoundment Control Act (the President may not refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress) would be found unconstitutional. But there is still a lot of gray area.
It is elementary school Civics 101 that POTUS may not spend money that Congress did not authorize nor spend funds on some entirely separate purpose contrary to the express will of Congress. It is also clear that Congress cannot micromanage how funds are used, or tell generals and admirals to prosecute a war in a manner contrary to the orders of the commander-in-chief. But what if POTUS does not want to spend the money? Does it matter specifically how the legislation directs the spending?
Congress automatically and generically feeds a beast no longer fully controlled by Congress or the president, so whither that needed constitutional clarity?
Did Congress require USAID to issue LGBTQ coloring books in Peru? If not, does the money still have to be spent on something else? If an entire program or agency is rife with fraud and waste, can it be suspended or ended without congressional consent?
If POTUS were given $20 billion by Congress to build a particular weapons system and DOD brings it in for $16 billion (yes, wildly hypothetical, but humor me), does he still have to give the builders the other $4 billion? Spend it elsewhere on defense, or can he give it back to the Treasury? There are precedents for this situation in the Truman Administration.
Can Congress mandate waste? Yes. Legislation can specify methods and acquisitions that are pure pork or just stupid. Can Congress mandate fraud? Not exactly, but exemptions could be created and incentives overwhelming.
SCOTUS will probably soon have to define the circumstances, reasons and procedures within which the President can substantially block abuses. And Trump’s people really need to avoid stepping on mines and instead build a defensible record of grounds and reasons for massive cuts.
In an ideal world, SCOTUS would give the president wide latitude but not total discretion (he can’t abolish an agency or entire program if Congress specifically established it without a heckofa good reason), especially if there is considerable discretion written into the appropriation. This would also force Congress to be far more specific instead of punting to the bureaucracies and make all of government more responsive and transparent. It could re-empower committees, bring about better oversight, and create accountability that currently does not exist (i.e., they know controversial groups and actions are being funded but don’t have to vote on the specifics).
I really hope the administration has a legal strategy in place for the protracted battles to come. A lot of battlespace needs prepping, and, unfortunately, the forces of evil are really good at this kind of thing. They figure (probably correctly) that significant litigation delays and just a few key electoral victories in 2026 might be enough to kill momentum and make the normals despair.
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The whole idea of having to spend all the money appropriated and not returning it to Treasury is stupid. How about a change in that perception?!
Great post. I also hope there’s a long-term strategy in place to address this problem once and for all.
I wonder if there’s any analysis being done of the “use it or lose it” aspect of federal budgeting. (To be fair, lots of non-governmental industries and corporations do the same thing.) Do most of the “Let’s teach Afghan peasant women to appreciate modern art by showing them pictures of urinals” type of expenditures come towards the end of the fiscal year? After all, there are only so many African Ebola victims to save, and the rest of those leftover dollars won’t just spend themselves.
Once you’ve completely drained the $70B you were assigned for this year, on whatever ridiculous projects you could dredge up, then you’re in line for the automatic percentage increase for next year, and on and on it goes. Perhaps there should be 1) incentives provided for not spending all the money allocated in any given year and 2) no blanket guarantee of a budgetary increase, rather than the reverse.
WRT the question posed in the OP’s title (Can Wasteful Spending be Mandatory?): Yes, it sure can. I’m a
retiredsurviving member of the healthcare IT “community.” The amount of money that the healthcare industry has to spend on mandatory, duplicative, ridiculous, and wasteful “compliance” edicts from both the federal and state government must contribute substantially to the outrageous cost of US healthcareI’ve said many times before here (maybe the first time had to do with Hillary’s bathroom email server) that if the private sector behaved as the government does, its corporations would be shut down and its executive officers would all be either fined or jailed for life. Nothing has changed. Perhaps it’s about to. That would be good.
Seems likely that “appropriation” should be taken to mean “allow” not so much “require.”
Is it a perception or the law? CNN thinks it is the law.
Some say it is only a ceiling but others say that it is not that simple.
Maybe the problem comes from the idea that the president/administration is supposed to have a budget to be voted on, and Congress then appropriates money to fit the budget, not the other way around. Appropriations for what they agree with, no appropriations – and hence no spending allowed – for what they don’t agree with. If that gets turned around, you run into several problems, not just one.
Great post. I’ve been wondering about all of this for weeks, and particularly that.
My guess is that the Democrat lawyers are hard at work exploring this.
It has been a point of contention between many Congresses and many presidents, and has seen legislative patches. This round, the immediate patch is a budget recision bill to formalize in Congress the acceptable changes presented by DOGE. There is no legal obligation (unless otherwise specified in the appropriation) to spend prior to the end of the fiscal year, September 30th. That is my best recollection of Sen. Ted Cruz on this topic, I am not a budget lawyer and am already further out on this particular branch than comfortable.
And CNN says whatever Democrat staffers feed them and repeat it as Eternal Writ. I trust them to be wrong more than right.
The idea of having to spend all the money allocated presupposes that the problem being addressed by the spending will not be solved or appreciably improved this year.
Now THAT is a really smart concept to convey–doh!
If you solve a problem, no money for you next year!
Either Congress has millions of line items in their spending bills or the president has discretion how the money is spent. If the money must be spent, then the president should spend it on things the left hates (free firearms training, debt relief for the USA,…)
The mechanics of agency budget growth was caricatured perfectly in The Weed Agency by Jim Geraghty. I recommend it for a very enjoyable read.
I’ve lived decades of it. But if one hasn’t, there it is.
You would be fact checked false by Snopes. Apparently, the embassy of Peru spent 32,000 thousand dollars promoting a comic that featured a gay character. However, the gay character was in a parade with trans looking people in the cover of the second issue with the rainbow flag. The rainbow flag also represents trans people so I get the mistake.
I scrolled through it and the art and colors look pretty good for government work.
More importantly, it was funded by the State Department rather than USAID as many other useless things are.
Because the white house press secretary made these two mistakes, you can technically say that USAID wasted 32,000 dollars on trans propaganda is entirely false.
I word argue that the deeper meaning of the story is that the government is wasting money frivolously for political and politically correct ends so I would categorize the story as being, ‘mostly true with some errors.’
Snopes disagrees and other
leftistsfact checkers deem the story false.It’s fascinating how different folks interpret stuff.
As far as your lead question, I’d say the answer is that Congress figured out a long time ago that wasteful and pointless spending could be made mandatory. Why shouldn’t it be? How else could people making $175K to $225K a year go from a personal net worth of under 2 million dollars to one valued at over 100 million in just 2 decades?
The defense industries understood the game and knew Congress would play along. .
As did big pharma, about which anyone paying attention began to understand during the COVID debacle.
Few Americans know that during the same speech which Pres Eisenhower delivered in order to warn America about the dangers within, he attempted to point out that there was a medical industrial complex that could be as dangerous as the military complex was.
Of course it is very important to understand who funds Snopes. Having a “fact checking” site that is funded by such a person as George Soros.
Google has been part of the alliance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9Q9RBzO_VU&ysclid=m7paryuc3n721236515
The above is from 6 years ago, and features Alex Jones. I find it hard to deal with his overly strident screeching, but it is a lot of necessary info in a mere 1 min 56 seconds. So if you can stiffen yr resolve, it is worth it!
CNN has lost so many viewers that if it were not for the vast sums that US AID distributes to our traditional media, CNN might no longer exist.
But to keep the forces behind the US AID money happy with their news propaganda, they must toe the liberal/Globalist line.
Remember a lot of money comes from Soros to the media. That family’s foundation will still be driving various messages into the mouths of Talking Heads long after George himself is dead.
This pertains now. It’s woven into what got us here, $31,000,000,000,000 in debt.
I don’t know if Elon is exactly a Savior or anything, but he is a clear-eyed engineer, and he sees things like this and says “aha, I think I have discovered a problem. Let’s stop this.”
One of the greatest lines in any movie ever was from Anton Chigurth, in the immortal NCFOM: “If the philosophy you followed led you to this, of what use is your philosophy?”
We do so many things right, get things right; it has made us a great, hugely successful country. But we allow and give into so many stupid things—most in a pretense to an imaginary virtue—that are illogical, and cheap and easy, that will destroy us. And should.
This new movement, MAGA or whatever it will be known as, isn’t perfect, but nothing is. Luckily we don’t need perfect, we just need honest, effective, stalwart, humble, and unwavering. A repudiation of the casual cynicism that every big organization HAS to drift into corruption. It may, but honorable men can live by a philosophy that says we always stand guard against casual and easy corruption.
Sorry, just watched LoTR again.
How dare you be sincere and unironic when the fate of the republic is at stake!
“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
It’s unfair to suddenly show up and apply the rules. I went to a Jack Nicholson movie and I was suddenly in the Untouchables. Forensic accounting is the order of the day. Stay strong, I think Jimmy Stewart is the second bill. Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
What does trade and automation produce? Deflation.
Artificial intelligence creates massive deflation.
What does the central bank do anyway? You know what it does. They lie about the figure. Felix Zulaf says it’s double what they state it is.
We do it because it’s the only way to be materialistic, otherwise known as keeping the trade routes open. Regressive taxation. The other thing is, we are too stupid and corrupt to keep a fractional reserve banking system together without lying about inflation.
The whole system is predicated on the constant infusion of debt principle into the system, spent as income. The Fed is always screwing around with the “wealth effect” which is simply getting rich people to spend money instead of focusing on wages and profit.
The system is stupid and it’s going to end the hard way.
https://www.grant-williams.com/podcast/the-grant-williams-podcast-adam-rozencwajg/
DOGE found that they spent thousands of dollars to educate the people in ***Nepal*** about federalist decentralized, spending or something. I thought this is really stupid because that is such a small country. Well, it actually has 31 million people in it. lol Having said that, you know it isn’t going to do a damn thing.
We had some of this same problem in the 1970s and 80s as federal judges took over telling school districts how to run schools (under the guise of fixing racial discrimination), and ordered school districts to spend money in ways counter to what the electorate wanted.
That is such a cool weird name.
“We must have inflation, but we shouldn’t.”
That’s why I always say that government should just consist of public goods. Supposedly 80% of government is non-public goods.