Just about anything a president wants to do – such as go to war, start an infrastructure project, or strengthen law enforcement – requires financing from Congress.
But increasingly, the government’s money hasn’t been going where Congress says it should.
The Trump administration is using unprecedented tactics to test the boundaries of how it can control taxpayer money that Congress has budgeted, threatening one of Congress’ core functions under the Constitution – and one of its strongest checks on executive power.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump is taking more control over federal spending, and Congress is ceding some of its power of the purse. They could be setting a new precedent that permanently expands a president’s power.
The efforts are a direct assertion of presidential power, often wielded in the name of taming wasteful spending. But the actions also reach into Congress itself.
Under presidential pressure, Congress is slowly upending its own spending process, passing party-line bills that circumvent its normal, bipartisan procedure and give presidents broader leeway. For example, Republicans hope to soon pass a bill that will fund federal immigration enforcement for years in advance.
Supporters of President Donald Trump’s policy say a president should be able to, for example, stop funds from going to countries that harm the United States’ interests, or save money if Congress’ goals can be accomplished with fewer funds than they laid aside.
Still, the practice signals a profound shift in how money is spent, raising questions over how or whether taxpayers can hold the government accountable and whether more White House control over spending will become a “new normal” that permanently expands a president’s power.
In Congress, even some members of President Trump’s party aren’t entirely comfortable with the transfer of spending authority.
“Retaining our constitutional authority has always been something that I see as important, and hopefully my colleagues do, too. So I hope that we maintain a balance,” says Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. “Or else we become more and more irrelevant.”
David Super, a federal budget expert at Georgetown University Law Center, believes that actions over the past year show that the new normal is already here.
“This changes [the funding process] forever,” he says. “If Trump can do it, so can everybody else.”
The administration hasn’t rejected Congress’ budgetary authority wholesale. But since Mr. Trump’s inauguration more than a year ago, his administration has unilaterally slashed some large categories of spending, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Education.
Mr. Trump and his executive branch have asserted the power to spend as well as to cut, in ways that Congress hasn’t authorized. Emergency declarations over immigration and energy paved the way for sending military reservists to the Southern border and promoting fossil fuel development.
On some of its actions, the White House has come to Congress after the fact to seek legislative support. Other times it has worked to undercut any legislative role.
Checks and balances
In August 2025, the president sent a request to Congress to cancel nearly $5 billion that Congress had directed be spent on foreign aid.
The Impoundment Control Act says a president must give Congress 45 days to consider any such request. But the White House sent their letter just over 30 days before the fiscal year ended.
The administration touted this as something called a “pocket rescission”: a procedural loophole promoted by White House budget director Russell Vought. The idea is that by submitting a request to cancel funding with only a few days left in the fiscal year, a president can effectively bypass Congress because the money simply lapses.
A lawsuit seeking to block the maneuver went to the Supreme Court, which sided with the administration. The intended recipients of the relief funds never saw that money.
Philip Joyce, a University of Maryland professor who researches public budgeting, says when actions like pocket rescissions get even a small sign-off from a court, it establishes them as options.
“That means that presidents have that power. Not just this president – all future presidents have this power,” says Dr. Joyce.
That’s not the only time the administration tried to withhold money Congress has set aside to be spent – a practice known as impoundment. The Trump White House has tested the limits of what constitutes impoundment by withholding grants and freezing or canceling programs it said conflicted with its priorities.
Mr. Vought has asserted that the Constitution doesn’t require a president to spend every dollar that Congress appropriates.
“It’s a ceiling, not a floor,” he said at a July 2025 breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.
Some Republicans in Congress make a similar case.
Republican Rep. John Rutherford of Florida argues impoundment could be a useful tool in cases where, for example, Congress overestimates the amount of money it will take to complete a certain project – and a president doesn’t need Congress’ OK.
“He controls the executive branch,” Representative Rutherford says.
A change to bipartisan funding
Another potential transformation in how Congress wields its power of the purse is coming from Congress itself.
Each year, members approve agency budgets, in what’s known as the appropriations process – or “the center of government,” as Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who is the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, puts it.
But amid budgetary gridlock in recent decades, it’s become increasingly common for parties in Congress to use a maneuver known as budget reconciliation in a novel way: to skirt that process when it comes to the things they really want passed.
These reconciliation bills – like the Republicans’ 2025 tax-and-spending bill dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – are distinct in two key ways: They effectively don’t require bipartisanship, and can provide funding for a party’s priorities for multiple years. That means there’s no annual evaluation of whether government spending is achieving its intended goals.
Under the traditional funding process, says Professor Super, “If [programs have] been inefficient or spending their resources on things that are not their job, or corrupt, they face a lot of embarrassment and they face funding cuts.”
Some lawmakers worry about Congress growing too used to this alternative funding pathway.
“We certainly don’t want to make it such that the way we get spending bills passed is exclusively through reconciliation,” says Arkansas Republican John Boozman, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “The problem here is everything is done by precedent. So that gets to be the easy way to do it.”
Keeping track of the money
The Trump administration has taken some actions that make it difficult to untangle exactly how taxpayer money that’s been budgeted by Congress is being spent.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File
After Mr. Trump’s first impeachment – in which he was accused of conditioning the release of congressionally approved money to pressure Ukraine – Congress passed a law requiring the Office of Management and Budget to make apportionment data public. That meant it had to disclose exactly how it parcels out congressionally approved funds to different agencies.
In March 2025, the OMB deactivated its public apportionment website, saying it could reveal sensitive information. The office later complied with a court order to start reposting documents, although watchdog groups reported missing elements, such as required footnotes.
“The administration has been … fast and loose in terms of what they’re making public and what they’re not,” says Dr. Joyce.
The White House has also used money appropriated by Congress in novel ways that make it hard to track.
During two recent government shutdowns, the Trump administration paid employees. Some legal experts said that was a kind of impoundment in reverse: Instead of the government refusing to spend money Congress had set aside, the government spends money that Congress hasn’t set aside – at least not for that purpose.
During the Department of Homeland Security shutdown that began February 2026, for example, the administration directed DHS employees to be paid with funds that had a “reasonable and logical nexus to the functions of D.H.S.” That definition left it unclear exactly which funds the president was using to pay these workers, and gave the administration – not Congress – wide leeway to decide what “reasonable and logical” meant.
“They were not at all clear about their legal justifications,” says Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
“Once you’ve ceded power … it’s gone.”
The current Congress hasn’t shown much inclination to claw back its power. And some experts predict the expanded presidential authority will carry into the future.
“It doesn’t really matter whether that executive is a Democrat or a Republican,” Dr. Joyce says. “Once you’ve ceded power – once you’ve given power from the legislative branch to the executive branch – it’s gone.”
Professor Super says it’s possible the balance of power between Congress and the president swings back in the other direction.
“Once we get past President Trump, I suspect Congress will reassert itself and dramatically shrink the flexibility that administrations have,” he says.
There’s some historical precedent. The Nixon administration’s use of expansive executive power led Congress to try to reassert its power. Congress passed laws – sometimes over the president’s veto – to enforce its authority over things like decisions about military conflict and limiting how the president spends congressionally appropriated money.
In the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s resignation, Congress passed a series of reforms designed to promote ethics and transparency in government.
Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, an Appropriations Committee member, says he doesn’t necessarily see Mr. Trump’s actions as opening the door for presidents’ expanded use of controversial tools going forward – “not if the Congress is zealous in protecting its Article I authority.”
Asked if Congress has been zealous enough so far, he replies, “We’ve had good days and bad days.”