[_heimdall]

Impoundment, or rather the idea that it is an issue, is a weird concept in general. Congress legislates executive directives that should be acted upon and provides a budget. They don't say "spend every dollar we give" and they rarely define metrics for success to know if the executive branch is meeting their goals.

The fact that the Trump administration is able to so easily chest the game and roll back agencies is a side effect of congress writing thousands of pages of legislation without ever bothering to define precisely what is expected of the executive branch.

[tsimionescu]

No, this is quite wrong. It is well understood in American law that "spend every dollar we give" is exactly what the budget approved by Congress means. It is then the duty of the executive branch to do so in an effective manner.

Laws shouldn't need to go into details on exactly how every last dollar is to be spent, they set the amount and the goals, and the executive exists to handle the details.

The problem is that the Trump administration is ignoring the laws they don't like. They're even trying to ignore a very explicit constitutional amendment (birthright citizenship). Writing more detailed laws would do nothing to make the Trump team follow the law.

[_heimdall]

I'd be very curious where in our laws it is written that congressional budgets must be spent in their entirety every year. I could just be wrong here, happy to learn something new.

> Laws shouldn't need to go into details on exactly how every last dollar is to be spent.

Laws should go into every detail that matters to those writing it. If all they care about is that the money is spent and that there's an agency with a certain name and one line mandate, sure that's all they need to specify. If the legislators cafe about what is or is not done, or if they care about any specific metrics of success, those should be codified in the law to make the intention and expectation clear.

Birthright citizenship and immigration is a whole other can of worms. We can go there but it's pretty off topic here.

[tsimionescu]

> I'd be very curious where in our laws it is written that congressional budgets must be spent in their entirety every year

It's included in the "CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET AND IMPOUNDMENT CONTROL ACT OF 1974"[0], Title X, at least as a base assumption. It's also part of the text of the annual appropriations bill(s), on most subjects.

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-10356/uslm/COMPS-1...

[_heimdall]

The Impoundment Control Act isn't as simple as "every dollar appropriated must be spent."

It defines how a President must notify congress to request a reduction in appropriated budget. That request is expected to contain a full accounting if expected financial impacts and reasons for the changes requested. Congress then has 45 days to respond, without congressional approval the request is considered denied.

What they are doing today could fall into a discovery period in which they're still collecting information to make a proper impoundment request. Whether they're actually acting in good faith there is yet to be seen, but they woould have to be allowed to look into and audit departments before being able to clearly lay out how much of the budget is waste and precisely why the reduction wouldn't impeded the departments from meeting their legal obligations.

[tsimionescu]

The impoundment control act makes it clear that, by default, the President must spend all the money as appropriated by Congress. The president can ask Congress for a dispensation from this base requirement, and Congress can deny it, going back to the president being forced to spend the money.

Note that this law was created specifically because Nixon had gotten into the habit of not spending money as apportioned by Congress if he didn't like the specific programs. So, Congress made laws to specifically not allow Presidents to do this on a whim.

And it is obviously false that funding must be paused in order to understand what the money is being spent on and identify waste. Both companies and government agencies routinely undergo extremely thorough audits without having to pause their activity. "I have a suspicion based on no proof whatsoever that waste might be happening, let's stop activity entirely while I search for the proof I don't have for this unmotivated belief" is not and can't be a good faith position.

[dragonwriter]

> Note that this law was created specifically because Nixon had gotten into the habit of not spending money as apportioned by Congress if he didn't like the specific programs. So, Congress made laws to specifically not allow Presidents to do this on a whim.

This is a little bit misleading, By the time the Impoundment Control Act was passed, the Nixon Administration had been hit by a flurry of lawsuits on impoundment, lost most of them at the trial level, and given up immediately and released the funds at issue in those cases. (There was one case they continued fighting up to the Supreme Court and lost 9-0 after the ICA passed, but not based on the ICA, just pre-existing law; there was also Supreme Court precedent going back to the 19th Century with the same conclusion -- the President has no authority to impound funds Congress has directed must be spent.)

The ICA was basically an olive branch -- it provides a method in law for the President to temporarily hold appropriated funds and request recission, specifying that the funds had to be released if, in 45 session days, Congress didn't affirmatively act on the recission request; this was an effort to provide a mechanism to address the problems that the unambiguously illegal attempts at impoundment were notionally motivated by. It wasn't to prohibit impoundment -- the existing laws directing expending funds already did that inherently.

[actionfromafar]

Too bad the Chevron doctrine was ditched then. Now Congress has to specify everything, maybe? Who knows? I think that uncertainty is the point thought. The Judges Nine have a project 2025, too.

[pfannkuchen]

A lot of people don’t like that “regulation” has been delegated to unelected agencies instead of having congress make laws.

Is the current structure of agencies with delegated regulatory powers specified in the constitution? I don’t think so. It isn’t explicitly forbidden, but it’s not like it’s what the founders had in mind or wrote down.

The current administration’s approach is activist in the sense that it would be more direct to just outlaw the current structure via congress. I suspect that isn’t possible at the moment due to the entanglement of corporate interests, regulatory agencies and lobbying money.

Activist action isn’t exactly new though. Maybe it hasn’t happened on the right wing as much in America in living memory, it feels like they felt like they were above it for a long time. They don’t feel like that anymore.

[tsimionescu]

What "many people" don't like about this system is just how effective it is at regulating their businesses. The alternative - that the 535 members of Congress should regulate every detail of every facet of federal life - is completely untenable.

The reality is that Congress has been effectively neutralized as a law making institution for at least two decades, barely able to do more than pass the budget and one or two big items per election cycle. The dream of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all the others is that the executive state will be similarly neutered, unable to effectively regulate any kind of big business interests.

The vast majority of the American people neither knows nor cares about the difference between a law that Congress passed and a regulation enacted by an agency of the executive (or between those and state lawd or even city regulations, much of the time). They care whether those rules are useful or detrimental to them. This is why agencies like the CFPB, that Musk and Trump have essentially dismantled (much to Mark Andreesen's delight, I'm sure) was extremely popular: normal people could see how it helped them or their friends. They didn't care that it was pursuing regulations not directly codified by Congress.

[_heimdall]

Said differently, most people don't care about principles.

The government is designed based on certain principles that define how it is meant to work, and there's a reasonable case to be made that the executive branch should not have the authority to functionally create laws or run their own courts. That just doesn't matter to most people, as you said they're happy if those regulations work for them.

The same situation pops up in most peoples' political views too. Most people pick a view on a topic rather than an underlying principle, ending up with contradictory views.

My father-in-law will talk a lot about older Republican talking points like smaller governments and individual rights and freedoms. Then abortion comes up and he wants governments to create laws telling people what they can or can't do with their body, or social security comes up and he's strongly in favor of more taxes and welfare/entitlement programs.

[tsimionescu]

I do agree that people rarely truly care about the principles they claim they adhere to, when it turns against their own interests.

But that is not what is happening here. A principle is not self-motivatingly good just because it exists. The principle that Congress must directly make every law and set every detail of that law is simply a bad principle, at least for a country of the size and complexity of the USA, and given the last 200 years of experience in good and bad governance.

Congress has long understood this, and so they have invested some of their legislative power into various executive agencies, while still maintaining a great degree of control over the broad strokes of what those agencies do.

It's not useful to anyone for Congress to, say, debate and set the exact safe level of every chemical known to man in water that should be enforced: the EPA exists to study this and take the right measures based on the most reasonable scientific knowledge of the day. If the CDC discovers that exposure to teflon above 1 part in 100,000 is likely to cause significant harm, it shouldn't be regulated only once Congress meets in the next session.

[_heimdall]

> But that is not what is happening here. A principle is not self-motivatingly good just because it exists.

The principle I was referring to is that the legislative branch creates law and the executive branch only only administers and executes on them.

I agree a principle is neither good or bad on its own, it just is. In this case it isn't good or bad that powers are separated this way, but it is foundational to how our government is designed.

Congress doesn't have to spell out every detail, I made that clear though maybe in a separate chain of comments here. They do, though, need to spell out whatever details are important to them. If all congress cares about is that a department exists with a certain name and spends every dollar of a given budget that's fine, but they can't complain at all about what the department does. In reality they should be spelling out fairly clearly what is expected of a department, in my opinion that would include metrics for success.