Molly Redden on Trump’s Plan to Seize Spending Power

ProPublica reporter Molly Redden joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss her recent piece on impoundment, Donald Trump’s strategy to thwart Congressional spending priorities. Redden talks about how the presidential budget and Congressional appropriations work now, Trump’s claim that he has the authority to ignore what Congress wants to fund, what this could mean for those he perceives as enemies, and the possible role of the “nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency,” co-led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

She explains the history of impoundment, Richard Nixon’s excessive use of the power to ignore projects he didn’t want to do, and how this led to a 1974 law restricting the option. She analyzes the likelihood that Trump will succeed in challenging the law and reflects on writing and reporting on seemingly outlandish schemes that are neither likely nor impossible. She reads from her article, “How Trump Plans to Seize the Power of the Purse From Congress.”

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: What I’m noticing is that increasingly it seems to me like conservative legal thinkers are looking and scouring through old laws to try to find ways to do fucked up things that they want to do; it’s an interesting strategy. How many more of these are we going to find? You know the Alien Enemies Act, this impoundment thing, do you see any other very old laws that we can bring back to do something that we would normally not be able to do?

Molly Redden: I mean, I think the bigger picture of what’s going on here is it’s this claim to history in order to justify really extreme interpretations of the law or really radical departures from how our government works today, which are maybe otherwise not very justifiable or wouldn’t be terribly popular.

WT: The other act that people talk about is the Insurrection Act, which we haven’t mentioned yet, which also gives the President very broad powers.

MR: Yeah, I think it’s of a piece with this sort of broader reach in the conservative legal movement for history and tradition to justify things that would maybe be otherwise really unpopular.

WT: Using history and tradition do justify ahistorical and nontraditional ways to do things.

MR: I mean, right, and that’s the issue: history and tradition can mean whatever you want them to, and I think a good example is how abortion rights and gun rights have played out before the Supreme Court? When the Court struck down Roe v. Wade, they made this gesture saying, “Well, it’s not consistent with our nation’s history and traditions. There are laws protecting this right, you know, going back to our nation’s founding,” which was sort of a new precedent, a new bar that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution; it doesn’t say anywhere that something has to go back to our nation’s roots to be legal.

But then you have the Supreme Court in a more recent case about whether people who have, I believe it was restraining orders for domestic violence could retain their gun rights, and the Court had previously applied the same history and traditions test to gun rights or or said that that was the bar. And of course, there are no laws from our history barring people convicted of domestic violence from owning firearms, but the Court recognized, I think, that that would be deeply unpopular to greenlight the ability of people accused or convicted of domestic violence to retain their firearms. So in that case, they were just like “Uh, this law can’t stand,” without really passing that same history and traditions test they’ve set up for themselves. My point with that is that I think it’s a really convenient rhetorical device for them, or they think of it in that way. They think that it provides that kind of cover to do things that are really out of step with public sentiment.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: We’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from being like, “Well, in the founding of our country, women couldn’t vote, and enslavement was perfectly fine,” or for them to be like, “Loving versus Virginia was really recent and not in line with our original conception of how the nation should be.” I mean I don’t know, am I disaster mongering or is this all a slippery slope towards an even shittier, more discriminatory path that they’re seeking?

MR: The way I think about this is they have made it very clear, they being Trump and his advisors, what their plans are for his second administration. And that is not the same as being successful. That is not the same as Congress and the Court and the Democrats, who are supposed to mount an opposition to this, and public sentiment failing to stop them. They’ve been very clear about what they want. They’re being pretty open about their plans to achieve what their goals are. That’s not the same as realizing them. The federal government is big. The federal budget is complicated, and there are a lot of people, even within the Republican Party, who have a really strong vested interest in maintaining some oppositional power to what Trump might want to do here. I think that’s an important perspective. They’ve said what they want to do. That’s not the same as a prediction for the future.

I think they’re going to accomplish a lot of what they set out to do, because he won the presidency, and the presidency is the most powerful office in the country. But as we saw from his first term, he’s not going to be able to accomplish everything he sets out to do. I think it just remains to be seen where there’s effective opposition, where his plans fall short. I know that’s not a satisfying answer, because people want to know. People understand that there’s really big change coming, and people want to know what that’s going to look like, and if they don’t like his plans, what the worst of it is going to be. But I think we still just don’t know. I think there are still question marks.

WT: Well the good news is that the guys who are going to be helping Trump think up ideas for how to do impoundment are two very smart guys: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are going to be in charge of a new, totally normal nongovernmental agency named after a meme coin called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Are they just being put out to pasture to jerk around, or do they actually have real ideas that Trump might try to put into place?

MR: Man, who knows? Yeah, I think this is a really good example of that, right? I mean, they say they would like to identify, I believe it’s 2 trillion dollars to recommend that Trump slash from federal spending.

WT: I want to break in here real quick. I have a theory on this, maybe you guys think that it sucks. What happened in Kansas when Sam Brownback was governor was that he finally got to do all of the crazy tax cutting and spending cutting that Republicans have always said that they wanted to do. It destroyed very good school districts, everyone hated it, and we’ve had like the two term Democratic governor since then. I wonder if doing this will basically put Trump and Republicans out of power for a period of time.

MR: I couldn’t possibly say, but I do think the Sam Brownback comparison is actually a pretty good one, because I think the idea of cutting wasteful government spending, firing thousands of civil servants who maybe are part of an inefficient system is really attractive on its face, but there, of course, remains a need for a lot of the institutions that we’re talking about.

WT: It’s fun to talk about, but when you go to get your driver’s license renewed and you can’t do it, people get pissed off.

MR: Yeah, exactly. I think there’s a lot of distance between saying “This government organization isn’t working very well, it isn’t serving people very well,” and “This government function should not exist.” This is not a defense of your local DMV, but I’m sure people would rather interact with the DMV and get their license renewed—these are obviously state functions—then have none at all.

Who even knows, right? People fall out of favor with Trump very quickly. We know that he hasn’t even been inaugurated. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, this operation they’re running isn’t even a formal part of the federal government. It’s basically an advisory committee. But interestingly enough, it could be the site of testing a lot of these mechanisms that we’re talking about. They’ve talked about it as potentially the first test of the Impoundment Control Act. What a time to be alive that California v. Doge could be a Supreme Court case.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.

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Molly Redden

“How Trump Plans to Seize the Power of the Purse from Congress” | ProPublica

Others:

“Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government” | WSJ • The Brownback Legacy: Tax cut push led to sharp backlash | Wichita Eagle | July 26, 2017 • The Constitution of the United States • Loving v. Virginia • Impoundment Control Act • Alien Enemies Act