The Trump Administration's Plan to Seize Control of Spending

[Passages]

Trump and his advisers want to bring back impoundment, enabling them to cancel spending appropriated by Congress.

BY DANIEL SCHUMAN JULY 19, 2024


Pundits are fixated on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but Russell Vought, the man described as Trump’s chief of staff-in-waiting, recently published an overlooked, dangerous plan that would place control of federal spending in Trump’s hands. It turns on the issue of impoundment, an outlawed practice that involves a president withholding funds appropriated by Congress. The first Trump administration attempted to use impoundment to further its agenda, and a second will not be deterred.

Here’s how impoundment in the hands of President Trump could work.

Example one: The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law contained $326 billion for transportation, including $40 billion for bridges and $8 billion for freight and highway transportation projects. Not all that money has been spent, however, and in some cases, the agencies responsible for spending the funds have not yet finalized contracts to commit those funds to a particular project. Trump could decide he doesn’t like states getting that money if they contain so-called “sanctuary cities,” because they constitute a security threat. He could subsequently order his executive branch to withhold funds from being spent in those states until they change their laws.

Example two: Public schools serve about 50 million kids and cost about $860 billion, with 10.5 percent of those funds coming from the federal government, or about $90 billion. The Trump administration could withhold funds from schools with DEI programs, or school libraries that carry books blacklisted by the administration, perhaps on the basis that they somehow embody foreign propaganda.

SNIP
Vought serves as president of the Center for Renewing America, “a far-right group operating under the aegis of the Conservative Partnership Institute,” in the words of The New Yorker. The Center is the Trump administration in exile, and the Conservative Partnership Institute is the brainchild of the far-right effort to take control of the government. To give you a taste, Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official Trump wished to make attorney general as part of his coup, and who was indicted for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, serves as the Center’s senior fellow and director of litigation.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-19-trump-administrations-plan-control-spending/

[underpants]

1. "...describes himself as a Christian nationalist. "

In 2019, Vought was one of nine government officials who defied a subpoena to testify before Congress in relation to the Trump–Ukraine scandal and the administration's decision to freeze military aid to Ukraine. The decision to freeze aid to Ukraine had led Democrats to launch the first impeachment of Donald Trump.[15][16]

On September 4, 2020, Vought, at Trump's direction, published an OMB memo instructing federal agencies to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on "critical race theory" or "white privilege" and to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert federal dollars away from these training sessions

Political and religious positions

Vought graduated from the evangelical Christian Wheaton College and describes himself as a Christian nationalist. He seeks to infuse the government and society with elements of Christianity, saying he has "a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society." He advocates for what he calls "radical constitutionalism" to reverse a current "post-Constitutional time" which he asserts has been the result of decades of corruption of laws and institutions by the political left. He characterizes the federal bureaucracy as "woke and weaponized" and advocates replacing it with conservatives to wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. Vought recommends a sweeping expansion of presidential power should Donald Trump return to office, to include deploying the military for domestic law enforcement, and reviving the ability of the president to withhold congressionally-appropriated funds, a practice Congress banned in 1974. Vought proposes gutting the FBI and ending the tradition of political independence of the Justice Department.[26][27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Vought

[Passages]

2. He is seriously twisted.

Thanks for the post.

[underpants]

3. Got that Stephen Miller vibe to him.

[jmowreader]

4. That'll go over REAL well in Congress

One thing Members of Congress do NOT like is anyone screwing with all the pork they stuffed in budgets. Trump trying to "impound" funds that their supporters spent all that money to get appropriated is a sure-fire recipe for an impeachment even the Republicans will support.

[GoodRaisin]

5. K&R