Trump and Musk are Usurping Congress's Power of the Purse

The Trump administration is illegally blocking authorized spending. If Congress lets them, the U.S. doesn't have Constitutional government.

In the U.S. Constitutional system, Congress has the power of the purse. That was a point of emphasis for the Founders, and it’s one of the first things we teach kids about the government. It’s right on principle—as per the Revolutionary War slogan “no taxation without representation”—and an important check on tyranny. We the People are sovereign, not any individual leader, so the only legitimate allocation of the people’s money is by the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

That’s not how the United States works today. The new Trump administration has claimed power of the purse, and has been acting on it.

One way is with executive orders abolishing or crippling government departments, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Education. Those and other executive branch agencies are authorized by law, passed by Congress and signed by the president. Congress effectively reauthorizes them every year by allocating spending for their operations. The White House has no authority to cancel that; the Constitution obligates the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3). And in case there’s any ambiguity in the Constitution, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 explicitly forbids a president from refusing to spend legally allocated funds.

Whatever you think of those agencies or anything they do, their existence is a matter of law, and the only Constitutional way to change that is via Congress or the courts.

America adjudicated this already, back in the 1990s, when the Supreme Court ruled President Bill Clinton’s “line item veto” unconstitutional in a 6-3 ruling supported by both conservative Justice Clarence Thomas and liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And that was after Congress passed the Line Item Veto Act, voluntarily giving the president the power to cancel parts of Congressionally authorized spending bills. Trump is claiming a bigger version of that power without even a partial legal leg to stand on. 

Today, the president is a Republican, both the House and Senate are led by Republicans, and they’re not even trying to change these laws by legislation. They’re just breaking them. Such is their contempt for Constitutional government.

Perhaps even more egregiously, Elon Musk has claimed the power to block Congressionally allocated funds from leaving the Treasury department, and deployed a group of young operatives to change the computer code of core government systems. As exposed by Wired reporters, these guys are 19 to 24 years old, did not go through the normal security clearance process to get access, and at least one has the sort of red flags that couldn’t pass the necessary background checks. They’ve blocked some Treasury outlays, shut out some legally authorized government employees, stolen tons of Americans’ personal data, and God knows what else.

A popular argument against this is that no one elected Musk, nor nominated and confirmed him to any executive branch post. That’s true—a private citizen personally controlling federal payments is unprecedented and wildly unconstitutional—but more a sign of how bad things have gotten than the problem itself.

Trump was elected, and says Musk is acting on his authorization. I doubt Trump could explain what Musk’s operatives are doing, but either way, the president definitely does not have the legal authority to send them. It’s another prong of the Trump administration's effort to end Constitutional democracy and impose dictatorship. The executive branch usurping the legislature’s core power like this turns Congress into an advisory panel, and renders checks-and-balances vestigial.

The Rabid and the Weak

The Founders knew popular election could install an authoritarian-minded criminal in the White House, and built multiple checks against it, including power of the purse. What they didn’t expect was Congress to weakly give it away.

It’s not because the Founders thought Representatives and Senators would be wise, good, patriotic, and committed to constitutional government. Just that enough of them would be egotistical. Self-important. Power hungry. The sort who’d object to anyone trying to take the power they won via election.

As Madison wrote in Federalist 51: “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

But Congress is acting as if it exists to serve the president’s personal ambitions. Whether enthusiastically defending Trump and Musk’s illegal actions, or weakly going along with them, the Republicans controlling both houses are throwing away their institution’s main power. And a handful of Democrats have been helping, pursuing bipartisanship and normalizing Trump-Musk efforts.

But not all. For example, a group of Democrats rallied at the Treasury building in opposition to Musk’s actions. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) asserted that the president doesn’t decide what happens with American taxpayers’ money—with or without his unelected oligarch friend—only Congress can.

Democrats held the Senate floor overnight, speaking in protest of Russ Vought, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Like Trump and Musk, Vought claims the right to block Congressionally authorized spending he doesn’t like, advocating illegal impoundment as a lead author of Project 2025 and elsewhere.

But then Republicans confirmed him on a party line vote, apparently because that’s what they want. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) explained her vote for Vought like this:

“If there are impoundments, I believe it will end up in court, and my hope is the court will rule in favor of the 1974 impoundment and budget control act.”

Why Collins used the Senate’s “advice and consent” powers to confirm an advocate of lawbreaking who will likely be taken to court, rather than avoid that problem by voting no and calling for a law follower instead, she did not say.

Congress isn’t doing anything close to defending its power to allocate taxpayer dollars. If they actually valued the Constitution, they’d have already united to impeach Trump for egregious abuse of power. At minimum, there should be veto-proof majorities passing resolutions condemning Musk’s lawless actions, and opening a formal investigation that starts issuing subpoenas. Instead, the Republicans leading Congress are dismissing concerns, and won’t allow consideration of bills to address them.

It’s a Constitutional crisis. Or perhaps a post-Constitution crisis, because if Congress does not have power of the purse in practice, then America doesn’t have Constitutional government anymore.

What is to be Done?

This may sound like defeatism, but it’s not. It’s a call for realism; for recognizing that the United States no longer operates according to laws and democratic norms—however imperfect that may have been in practice—but according to baser forces of power and public legitimacy.

Trump and Co. have a lot of power, including a degree of permission for lawbreaking from both Congress and the Supreme Court, seen in their ability to send Musk’s operatives to flagrantly violate the law without consequence. But that doesn’t make them immune to public opinion.

Legitimacy is amorphous, but every government needs it to stay in power. It can’t be measured with precision, but all states have a limit. More authoritarian governments than 2025 America have fallen when enough of the public found them illegitimate, such as the “No” campaign that ousted Pinochet in Chile, or in the Color Revolution protests of former Soviet republics.

Calling out the Trump administration’s lawbreaking is worth it, not because doing so will get them to respect the Constitution, but because it’s true. Because rule of law democracy, with checks and balances, was better than the corrupt oligarchy Trump and Musk are building. Because the truth and the law are a strong basis for arguments. Many Americans still believe they have value, even if the 2024 electorate empowered someone who doesn’t. 

Similarly, it’s worth taking the administration to court, even if that won’t stop the White House from breaking the law.

It forces their lawyers—most of whom still fear disbarment and won’t blatantly lie to a judge—to argue untenable positions in court, and limits Trump to the sort of lawyers who will. It’ll get court orders, and even if the president defies them, they’ll get some government officials to at least pause illegal activity.

Public outcry and judicial rebuke already got the administration to back down from trying to unilaterally cancel the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. They might try again, but thwarting any unconstitutional power grab is beneficial, and shows that, even as the White House operates outside the law, it is not without constraints.

Judges ruling that the president broke the law makes headlines. It sends signals to the public that this is abnormal, serious, and wrong.

So do protests, especially if they’re larger, more sustained, and made up of regular people—reasonably concerned people, like you—rather than radicals.

So do public stunts, like the Congressional Democrats going to the Treasury to shine a light on what Musk’s goons were doing.

A devoted Trump fan won’t care, of course, but that’s at most a third of the public, and less if we include nonvoters. In a closely divided country—Trump’s popular vote share was shy of a majority, and now he’s the first president to start with a net negative approval rating in Gallup’s long-running poll—it wouldn’t take much to shift the national vibes.

A portion of Trump voters will sour on him as conditions worsen, and don’t match their rose-colored memories of the pre-COVID economy. Some Congressional Republicans are up for reelection in 2026, and will care if they fall behind in polls. Parts of the business community will remember that rule of law and a reliably knowable regulatory environment are good for business, and snap out of their “Trump doesn’t really mean all that stuff he keeps saying, at least I’ll get a tax cut” complacency.

I don’t know where the legitimacy threshold is, and things will almost certainly get worse before they get better. But in general, increasing popular opposition is the way out of this.