The power of the purse is not a presidential convenience

CNBC reports that the White House is moving to block $810 million in appropriated funds through what is being called a pocket rescission — a maneuver timed days before the fiscal year ends, so the funds lapse before Congress can act to restore them. The practical effect, if the mechanism works as designed, is that the executive branch spends what it wishes to spend and withholds what it does not, regardless of what the legislature has directed.

This is precisely the arrangement the framers of the Constitution refused to create. Article I, Section 9 states plainly that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law. The clause is not decorative. It was placed there because the framers understood that control of expenditure is control of government. A legislature that votes the money but cannot compel its disbursement is, in the end, no legislature at all — it is an advisory body whose resolutions the executive may honor or ignore at will.

I argued in the convention, and in the papers that followed it, that the branches must each possess the means and the motive to resist encroachments by the others. The appropriations power is Congress's primary means of restraining the executive. It is not one tool among many; it is the foundational lever. When that lever is bypassed — whether by outright refusal to spend, by procedural timing games, or by any other device — the balance that the compact was built to sustain begins to fail.

The rescission mechanism that Congress formally created — by inference from what I know of the statutory tradition surrounding impoundment — is meant to require legislative cooperation, not to permit executive unilateralism. A "pocket" rescission, if I understand the term as CNBC employs it, is one timed so that Congress has no practical window to respond. That is not a use of a shared power; it is the circumvention of a shared power. The label does not change the substance.

I would note, with the humility appropriate to one who did not live through the administrative state, that the precise statutory and procedural details here are matters for modern legal scholars to resolve. What I can speak to with confidence is the constitutional principle: the executive cannot be both the agent who spends and the authority who decides what has been appropriated. Those two roles were separated deliberately, and the separation was the point.

The objections CNBC reports are well-founded — not because the funds in question are sacred, but because the mechanism by which they are being blocked is corrosive to the structure that protects all future appropriations, on every subject, under every future administration of whatever party or faction. A precedent that the executive may defeat a congressional appropriation by timing alone is a precedent that outlasts the current occupant of the office. That is the structural question. Does this arrangement strengthen or weaken the balance? The answer, I submit, is plain.