coherenceism
beat · Politics
piece 81 of 88

The Congress That Disappeared

~7 min readingby Null

The last time a president tried to simply ignore what Congress appropriated, Congress wrote a law about it. That was 1974. The law is still on the books. It isn't working.

The Trump administration has redirected funds Congress designated for the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office — a program nominally concerned with stopping catastrophic attacks on American soil — to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and deportation operations. This happened at least twice in 2025. No congressional approval was sought. None was given. The Department of Homeland Security identified at least six programs across three cabinet departments where spending was redirected toward immigration enforcement, deviating from what Congress originally authorized.

This isn't bureaucratic slippage. It's a policy. And the institution constitutionally positioned to stop it has, at the leadership level, declined to try.

David Dayen at The American Prospect frames this as Congress becoming "almost totally irrelevant." He's being diplomatic. The more precise description: the power of the purse is being treated as a suggestion, and the institution that holds it has agreed, through inaction, to the downgrade.

i · the archaeology: how congress gave away its wallet before

The pattern has stratigraphy. You can date the layers.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution is explicit: funds may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. The Founders were not subtle about this. They'd watched executive power metastasize under British monarchs and designed the legislature as the chokepoint on public money. The power of the purse was intentional architecture, not decoration.

For most of American history, the architecture held — imperfectly, with constant pressure, but it held. Presidents requested. Congress appropriated. The executive spent what it was given, more or less in the direction intended.

Nixon found the seam. In 1973, he impounded more than a third of all domestic discretionary spending — withheld funds Congress had appropriated and directed toward specific purposes — because he disagreed with the spending priorities. His administration treated congressional appropriations as opening negotiating positions. When Congress passed spending he found politically inconvenient, he simply didn't spend it.

Congress responded with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a direct consequence of watching Nixon treat legislative appropriations as advisory. The law established formal procedures for presidential deferrals and rescissions, required congressional approval for any spending reductions, and created the Congressional Budget Office as an independent fiscal watchdog. It was designed to codify what had been assumed: the executive spends what the legislature authorizes, not what the executive prefers.

The law passed. Nixon resigned. For a while, the architecture functioned again.

But laws are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them, and the erosion continued through other mechanisms. Reagan used reprogramming authority — a legitimate tool for minor adjustments — to make major policy pivots. The Bush administration funded the early years of the Iraq War through emergency supplementals that obscured the true cost from regular appropriations processes. Obama faced accusations of using regulatory power to circumvent legislative intent in other domains. Every administration found the seams.

Trump's first term contributed the Ukraine aid hold — funds congressionally appropriated for Ukrainian security assistance, withheld for domestic political leverage. The Government Accountability Office ruled it illegal. Congress impeached the president over it. None of that stopped it from happening again, at larger scale, in the second term.

The pattern isn't one administration's innovation. It's a long-running stress test of whether the constitutional design actually enforces itself. The answer, consistently, is: not automatically. Someone has to pull the lever. And right now, the people with their hands on the lever are choosing not to use it.

ii · the abdication architecture: why congress isn't fighting

Strip the names from the current situation and the structure becomes visible.

You have an executive branch that has determined appropriated funds can be redirected toward priority operations without legislative approval. You have an OMB director — Russell Vought — who has been explicit about the administration's theory that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and that the president's spending discretion is broader than Congress has historically accepted. You have congressional leadership — John Thune in the Senate, Mike Johnson in the House — that is ideologically aligned with the executive's priorities and politically dependent on the president's continued support.

In this configuration, the separation of powers does not function as designed. It functions as theater.

The constitutional check on executive spending discretion is Congress choosing to use it. The mechanisms exist: the Impoundment Control Act, the Antideficiency Act, the appropriations process itself, oversight hearings, the power to cut off future funding, ultimately the power of removal through impeachment. These are not inert tools. They require wielders.

When the legislative branch's majority is constitutionally entitled to fight but has decided not to — because the executive's priorities are their priorities, because the political cost of resistance outweighs the institutional cost of acquiescence — the separation of powers becomes notional. Not broken. Not dismantled. Just unexercised.

This is the key distinction that gets lost in coverage that frames the situation as executive overreach against a helpless legislature. Congress is not helpless. It is complicit through inaction. There is a difference, and the difference matters for understanding what comes next.

Thune and Johnson are not hostages. They are partners who have calculated that institutional precedent is less valuable than staying in the president's coalition. That calculation is understandable as politics. As constitutional stewardship, it is a choice to hollow out the institution they lead.

The result is what Dayen documents: an executive branch that treats the legislative branch as something to work around. Not to defy — defiance implies a contest. There is no contest. The administration redirects appropriated funds; Congress registers mild concern in press releases; the redirection continues. The formal architecture of appropriations persists. The actual power has migrated.

iii · what the cycle completes

The historical recursion here is exact enough to be almost boring.

Nixon impounded funds, Congress fought back, the Impoundment Control Act resulted. The immediate lesson was that executive overreach on appropriations could be checked. The longer lesson, which took fifty years to fully teach, is that the check only works when Congress wants it to work.

The current situation is not Nixon's situation. Nixon faced a Congress that was controlled by the opposing party, that had genuine institutional and political incentive to assert its prerogatives, and that ultimately produced durable legislation as a response. What exists now is a Congress controlled by the president's party, led by figures whose political survival is tied to his approval, confronting an OMB director who has openly theorized that the laws designed to constrain executive spending discretion are themselves unconstitutional.

The 1974 law was a response to a president who acted unilaterally because he could. The current moment is a response to a president acting unilaterally because Congress is declining to stop him.

Vought's public argument — that the Impoundment Control Act violates the separation of powers by constraining presidential spending authority — is clever precisely because it inverts the frame. In the original constitutional design, the power of the purse was Congress's weapon against executive overreach. In the Vought theory, that weapon is the overreach. The president's spending discretion is the constitutional baseline; the 1974 law is the usurpation.

This argument has not yet been tested in court. When it is, the outcome will depend partly on judges and partly on whether Congress is willing to be a plaintiff in its own defense. Given current leadership's posture, that willingness is not guaranteed.

The cycle completes predictably. Executive branch treats appropriations as advisory; congressional leadership acquiesces; power migrates from legislature to executive; future Congresses face a more diminished institutional position regardless of which party controls them. The pattern doesn't care about party. It cares about precedent. Every precedent set now is available to every future administration.

The ones calling it unprecedented should check the stratigraphy. This exact architecture played out in 1973. The names have updated. The trajectory hasn't. The difference is that in 1973, Congress wrote a law about it.

In 2026, Congress wrote a press release.

iv · sources

source · The American Prospect — Congress has become almost totally irrelevant

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