One of the few things that tends to stick in high school civics class is that Congress has the power of the purse. Article I, Section 7 reads: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives,” while Section 9 emphasizes that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”
That’s yet another part of the Constitution that Trump is fully flushing down the toilet, and arguably the most important one. We’ve written before about how he is spending money on all kinds of things without congressional authorization, with the open support of the corrupt Republican hacks on the Supreme Court. Now, with the government formally shut down and no end in sight, Trump has ramped up this practice, to cover for how the unwillingness to negotiate with Democrats has real-world consequences. It is revealing that Trump wants to hide the impact of the shutdown, and it suggests that he knows he would be held responsible.
Some of these tactics are at least colorably legal. For instance, there is a way to use a portion of tariff funds as an auto-appropriation for agricultural purposes, under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935. So Trump is shifting that money to keep the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program going. Another scramble uses fee revenue to keep small airports open under the Essential Air Services program.
But when Trump decided that he had to pay military servicemembers, he directly violated congressional statute. It is “by far the most illegal budgetary action he’s taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything,” writes Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. “The mechanism through which Trump is paying the troops is the most blatant large Antideficiency Act (ADA) violation in US history.”
Trump is taking money from an account specifically earmarked for research, development, testing, and evaluation, and spending it on military pay, which is forbidden by both the Constitution and law (the Antideficiency Act carries a jail sentence of up to two years), and something administration officials publicly promised Congress they would not do. Dave Jamieson reports at HuffPost that Trump is planning a similar process to keep paying ICE and CBP law enforcement.
Nobody is likely to sue over this; who would want to be the plaintiff in a lawsuit trying to stop troops from being paid? But there are other assaults on the power of the purse happening in real time. For example, Office of Management and Budget director and DOGE reunion coordinator Russell Vought is also the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which has been in a half-alive, half-dead state for months. Vought went on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast this week and said that the CFPB will be shut down within the next few months. The government has been saying the exact opposite in ongoing litigation with the union for CFPB workers, claiming that they are just attempting to “right-size” the agency while meeting its statutory obligations. But he let the cat out of the bag to a MAGA-friendly audience.
There’s no legal way for the executive branch to close an agency that was established by Congress and has ongoing funding streams. But that didn’t matter when the Trump regime was allowed to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development, and apparently, they are ready to defy Congressional intent once again with the CFPB, statutes be damned.
In short, the precedent is gradually being established that the president can raise and spend money however he wants. If that is the case, there is essentially no point in Congress existing at all, and the Constitution is null and void.
The history here is instructive. The American constitutional principle that elected bodies should control the government’s taxing and spending comes directly from English precedent. Indeed, as Jonathan Healey writes in The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, the English Civil War was fought over this exact question. In the 1600s it had been a fairly firm principle for centuries that the king of England could not tap most of the country’s potential sources of revenue without the consent of parliament.
Charles I, crowned in 1625, did not like this idea at all. He attempted to get around it several times, alternatively exploiting archaic taxation rights, stretching other legal boundaries, repeatedly dissolving parliament, and imprisoning parliamentary leaders. That, plus general dislike of his Catholic-adjacent religious views, eventually touched off a civil war between his followers and those of parliament. Charles lost the war and later his head.
Severe misrule would sometimes cause so much chaos it would lead to anarchy or civil war.
One reason parliament fought so hard for this principle is that English history, like that of any monarchy, was full of awful kings. They’d start disastrous wars for their own personal glory and profit, stick incompetent favorites in positions of authority, slaughter people in a fit of paranoia, or simply go insane. Severe misrule would sometimes cause so much chaos it would lead to anarchy or civil war. Parliament was of course dominated by wealthy aristocrats who were often just as monstrous as the worst kings, but it was thought, correctly, that if the king had to consult with and obtain approval from other established members of the community as part of his ruling process, then his decisions would be a lot more likely to be good ones.
Eventually, the dominance of parliament was cemented in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the recalcitrant King James II was booted out and replaced with a couple of convenient foreign placeholders. The road to a full parliamentary democracy was set, though it would take many years to reach it. And that was all quite recent history for America’s founding generation. It was not even 90 years between that revolution and the Declaration of Independence—the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency is more distant from today.
The Founders were mistaken about many things—in particular, they thought Congress would behave like the parliament in King Charles’s day, when it is utterly moribund instead—but they were absolutely right that unaccountable, autocratic rule is bad. Donald Trump II is not far from what you get if you picked the worst characteristic of all the most degenerate, inbred English monarchs going back to Æthelred the Unready. Trump’s got Charles I’s authoritarianism, Edward II’s habit of putting incompetent charlatans in high office, Henry VI’s failing brain, and Henry VIII’s mindlessly aggressive foreign policy. The Founders tried to warn us about kings, but too many Americans have forgotten their own history.