[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.