WASHINGTON — Lawmakers unhappy with President Donald Trump’s plans to cut spending that Congress approved are ignoring that past presidents have used similar powers, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought said Wednesday.
Vought invoked examples of presidents from George Washington to Richard Nixon to defend Trump’s government spending reform in a Wednesday speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. The remarks came days after the White House listed congressionally-approved “wasteful” foreign aid that the Trump administration is planning to scale back.
“We would never view that Congress doesn’t have the power of the purse, but the executive has the power to spend,” Vought said.
The last funding cancellation similar to Trump’s, known as a pocket rescissions package, came under former Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1977. The pocket rescissions package effectively withholds funds until they expire. Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans have argued that the administration’s plans to revoke the funds with or without congressional approval are unlawful.
Democrats also opposed a different type of rescissions package that passed with congressional approval in July, codifying Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) funding cuts and defunding left-leaning public media entities.
“The first time we defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fantastic. But we’re also not gonna take off the table unilateral moves that the president can do to spend less,” Vought said.
“That was an important notion that Congress sets that ceiling and presidents have the ability to spend less … if they think it’s important to prevent waste and abuse, and literally 200 years of presidents did this from George Washington up until Richard Nixon,” Vought said.
Following Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act, requiring the president to spend money Congress appropriated in most cases and stripping presidential power “at the lowest moment of the presidency,” Vought said. “We have a fundamentally different system. In some respects, it is a revolution that occurred over the last 100 years,” he added.
Trump’s rescissions package guts $5 billion in “woke, weaponized, and wasteful” foreign aid, the White House said Friday. The items include $400 million approved for climate change-focused programs, $13.4 million to promote so-called civic engagement in Zimbabwe and $4 million toward increasing “global LGBTQI+ awareness,” according to the White House.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has claimed that pocket rescissions are illegal, citing the Impoundment Control Act. Vought supports the president’s actions from a constitutional standpoint and thinks the GAO should not exist as a “quasi-legislative independent entity,” he said Wednesday.
“Instead of being overly concerned with what the post-Watergate consensus in this town has been, we have tried, the president has tried, to have the view of, ‘what would the founders have thought?’” Vought told his D.C. audience.
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