The Power Grab That Embodies Trumpism

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/opinion/trump-congress-spending-power.html

https://archive.ph/0p36Q

The Power Grab That Embodies Trumpism
Nov. 14, 2025
By The Editorial Board

The Constitution gives the authority to tax and spend not to the head of state, but to the elected representatives who are closest to the people: the members of Congress. Money is power, and the founders of this country feared that a president would turn into a monarch if he alone could dictate how the government uses the federal treasury.

President Trump, however, has tried to take Congress’s constitutional power and make it his own. He has repeatedly ignored laws passed by the House and the Senate to spend money, or not spend it, based on his whims and agenda. He has violated the law at least six times, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency. That total does not include the government shutdown, when he continued to disregard the law.

The moves are part of a strategy designed chiefly by Russell T. Vought, Mr. Trump’s budget director and an author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, which laid out a potential agenda for a second Trump term. The moves also fit with Mr. Trump’s broader strategy to push the United States away from its democratic traditions and concentrate power in a single person — him. Alarmingly, congressional Republicans have stood by while Mr. Trump has executed this power grab.

Mr. Trump’s abuses of spending power fall into three categories. First, he has refused to spend money that Congress allocated. He avoided allocating foreign aid with a maneuver known as a pocket rescission, and he withheld funds for electric vehicles, libraries and museums, preschools, other schools, grants for scientific research and emergency response operations.

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