The purse and the sword

Ok, but why does Congress control spending?

Feb 14, 2025

Look past the chaos and confusion for a second. What’s really going on with DOGE, the mass firings and suspensions, the funding freezes, the attempts to shutter whole agencies with a stroke of a pen (or, more realistically, a post on Truth Social)?

Simple. Oldest, truest story ever told: It comes down to money. Your money, who controls it in the federal government. Is it Congress? Or is it the White House?

On one side you have Elon Musk and Russ Vought (more on Vought here) who believe that they, specifically, as the president’s designees, should control decisions to spend or not to spend. On the other, you have Congress. Or rather, we should have Congress — but at least so far, Republican leadership have attempted to surrender their powers unconditionally. Per The New York Times:

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that he agreed “wholeheartedly” that the Trump administration could make sweeping cuts to federal spending without the approval of Congress, taking a position at odds with the Constitution’s separation of powers that undercuts his own branch of government.

So, instead of Congress, the courts — the third branch of government — have been called in to defend Congress’ prerogative on its behalf.

All those lawsuits, all those protests, all those heart-wrenching stories of arbitrary cuts to HIV clinics or rural health providers? They’re all one part of the big question: Will the judiciary defend Congress’ constitutional role and force the White House to follow the law? Or will both other branches surrender to Donald Trump and give him (and, presumably, all future presidents) power over the government’s finances?

That’s the big picture.

But why does Congress have the spending power?

This is one of those things in the Trump era where crystal-clear facts and law — Congress controls spending and much of this is plainly unconstitutional — can, somehow, make it harder to communicate the pretty monumental stakes at play.

My bet is it’s not obvious to most Americans why one branch or the other should have control over the checkbook, and just saying “this is against the law!” over and over again risks falling somewhat flat.

So I want to back up to why our system is designed like it is, why the Framers gave Congress the purse strings. And then we’ll get into what happens when the executive branch usurps that power.

The Framers chose Congress deliberately

First let us let the people who wrote the Constitution speak for themselves.

They knew the power of the purse was one of the most important — maybe the most important — levers of power in government. (After all, taxation was on their minds.) That’s why they gave spending powers to Congress. James Madison, writing in Federalist 58:

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse… This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.

And they saw this as a part of a deliberate system of checks and balances. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78:

The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated.

In short, the president holds the sword, Congress holds the purse. (And then the courts mediate and check both of the others.) This arrangement was very deliberately created to protect against tyranny. Again, Hamilton, this time speaking at the New York ratifying convention for the Constitution:

“Neither one nor the other shall have both; Because this would destroy that division of powers, on which political liberty is founded; and would furnish one body with all the means of tyranny. Where the purse is lodged in one branch, and the sword in another, there can be no danger.”

The executive is so much worse for making spending decisions

Even if you put aside the Framers’ intent, there are a bunch of reasons —beyond separation of powers — why a legislature is a much better fit for spending decisions.

Budgets impact everyone, so everyone needs a seat in the decision: There are 335 million people in the United States. Each and every one of them is impacted by the government’s spending decisions. A representative body like Congress is much better positioned to take all of their interests into account than a single executive.

Spending is supposed to be a compromise, not a mandate: We all have things we want funded and things we don’t want funded. That’s how it works in a democracy, and we have to work something out. Deciding spending through Congress is a way to negotiate and compromise on those priorities, not steamroll each other.

The power of the purse is extremely ripe for presidential abuse: Because spending decisions are so consequential — and so vulnerable to weaponization or corruption — giving Congress the power of the purse helps mitigate the risks taxpayer funding will be stolen or misused. (If the wealthiest man in the world makes all the spending decisions, there are no such safeguards.)

There’s no way the White House can effectively listen to all Americans: When asked what nonprofits who had their funding frozen should do, here’s what the White House had to say:

The idea that one person — in this case, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget — can field phone calls about every single funding concern in a country as big as ours pretty much gives away the whole game. It’s impossible.

But you know who does have the capacity to listen to all Americans on which schools, bridges, hospitals, military bases, nonprofits, care facilities, and parks are most deserving of your taxpayer money?

The 535 Senators and Representatives we specifically elected to do so.1

What happens when the spending power is usurped

If the White House takes the spending power from Congress, real harm ensues. It can happen deliberately if a vengeful president decides to wield our taxpayer dollars against his enemies. Or it can be by accident as the president and his advisors make rash changes without the considered, deliberative process that Congress is supposed to follow.

But either way, the damage can be significant. Just check out some of these testimonials from impacted researchers and care or service providers in recent weeks, collected at fedfreeze.org.

The federal government supports a huge amount of lifesaving research and care. We can’t afford to give the president — not to mention an unelected shadow president — arbitrary, unilateral power over what our tax dollars fund.

Visit Fedfreeze.org

The X-ification of the federal government

Two things to read on Elon Musk and the federal government.

First, read the Washington Post’s Amber Phillips’ “5-Minute Fix” on Musk’s approach: What is Elon Musk actually doing?

He’s using a scorched-earth strategy not unlike how he turned Twitter upside-down when he bought it, said Nicole Schneidman, a technology policy strategist with the anti-authoritarian group Protect Democracy. When Musk took over Twitter, he scrubbed the staff down to the bare minimum, and employees were even locked out of office buildings. Last week, USAID employees were similarly locked out.

Then read Nicole’s piece (with Dean Jackson) in our Entrenchment Agenda series on: How Musk and Trump could build a techno-autocracy.

As Nicole says (in Amber’s piece):

“Musk transformed Twitter into X. That reflects his own image and political agenda, and he’s leveraged that platform as his own personal mouthpiece… It’s a difficult thing to watch unfold with the federal government.”

The cost of the “Fork”

With the "Fork in the Road" back on (for now), I asked Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, for how he’s thinking about the deferred resignation offer:

The administration claims 75,000 employees took the deferred retirement deal. The average salary of a federal employee is $106,382 and their benefits cost the government another 38% of that salary ($40,425). So the cost of this so-called deferred retirement is in the realm of $146,807 x 75,000 x 0.58 = $6.38 billion. These are people who were ready and willing to work for their country. Instead, they’ll be on paid leave for seven months. Elon Musk burned billions of dollars of taxpayer money on a silly stunt just to bully public servants. How do you tell hard working American families that you just paid people who actually wanted to help the government deliver for the American people over $6 billion not to work — and then made those families pay the tab run up by an unelected billionaire?

Resources on the memo here in our Dear Civil Servant series: Separating truth from fiction on the “Fork in the Road”

The White House has repeatedly barred the Associated Press from media events in retaliation for its editorial choices around the attempted renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. (The AP is standing strong.) This is the sort of blatant censorship that Kenneth Parreno and Janine Lopez warned about last week: Trump’s efforts to censor the press.
The Justice Department directly intervened with federal prosecutors, forcing them to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Per The New York Times, “Adams met with Mr. Trump near his Mar-a-Lago estate last month in an unusual display of political, and perhaps personal, outreach… Mr. Adams has said that he would not publicly criticize Mr. Trump.” The interim US Attorney and at least five other prosecutors have resigned in protest. Read Sassoon’s letter here.2
“Honestly terrifying.” SFGate has a deep-dive into how the chaos in the federal government is trickling down to “America’s best idea” — and Yosemite National Park in particular.
Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, has a provocative take on how to think about Musk’s goals: “neo-apartheid.”
The New York Times editorial board has a must-read piece on what happens if the Trump administration defies a Supreme Court order. “If that happens, no part of society can remain silent.”

What you can do:

Here’s something to consider to keep your own purse safer from the sword. It’s tax season. This is obviously not legal advice, but you might want to consider taking a closer look at your taxes this year as you prepare your annual return. It may sound paranoid, but one thing we know from other backsliding countries is that selective prosecution for minor violations is often used to harass and intimidate opposition. Especially those who do critical work that the current administration may frown upon.

In fact, we know from Donald Trump’s first term that he sought to weaponize IRS audits against critics. Per The New York Times:

Privately, Mr. Trump pressured the Justice Department and the attorney general to investigate and prosecute Mr. Comey, saying he would prosecute Mr. Comey himself if the attorney general refused. Mr. Trump told his White House chief of staff that he wanted to “get the I.R.S. on” Mr. Comey.

Don’t give them even the smallest opening.

Lots of experts argue that — precisely for this reason — congressional capacity should be expanded. We need more hands doing this hard work, not fewer! See more: wherewilltheyallsit.org

For context, back in 2016, a chance meeting between ex-President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch — while Hillary Clinton was under investigation — was considered a major scandal because of the mere appearance of possible political interference in DOJ decisionmaking.