The purse and the sword must never meet in the same hand

The New York Times reports that members of both parties are casting doubt on what would be the largest military budget in American history, precisely because the administration has declined to disclose the costs of its war with Iran. I will not pretend to know the operational details of that conflict — those belong to a world I could not have foreseen. But the constitutional structure at issue is one I helped to build, and I recognize the strain upon it immediately.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution is unambiguous: no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law. That clause was not decorative. The framers placed the power of the purse in the legislature with full deliberation, precisely because they understood that the power to make war and the power to fund it must be separated. A government that can wage war without accounting for its expenditure has concentrated in the executive the very combination of capacities we most feared.

Federalist No. 58 — which I had a hand in composing — observed that the power of the purse is "the most complete and effectual weapon" by which the representatives of the people can obtain redress of every grievance and carry into effect every just and salutary measure. That weapon is blunted to uselessness if the executive is permitted to incur obligations in secret and present Congress only with a bill it dare not refuse for fear of being seen to abandon soldiers in the field. That is not accountability; it is coercion dressed in patriotic language.

The Times lead tells us that members of the president's own party share this unease. I take that as a sign that the instinct for institutional self-preservation is not yet dead in the legislature. But instinct is not enough. Bipartisan discomfort, if it does not harden into bipartisan insistence on disclosure, becomes nothing more than a complaint registered and forgotten. Congress must use the appropriations process as the framers intended — not as a rubber stamp presented after the fact, but as the prospective, deliberate authorization of public resources for public purposes known to the public.

I cannot speak to what military technology now costs, nor to the precise accounting of a modern air campaign. Those are inferences I am not equipped to make. What I can say with confidence is this: the structural question is unchanged across two and a half centuries. Who holds the power? By what authority is it exercised? And to whom must an accounting be rendered? If the answer to the last question is "no one, or not yet, or perhaps never," then the balance the framers designed has been displaced. The remedy is not to wish for a more forthcoming executive. The remedy is for Congress to exercise, firmly and without apology, the authority the compact assigns to it — and to refuse appropriations until that accounting is made.