Congress Cedes Power of the Purse

Early yesterday morning in Washington, DC, all but two House Republicans voted to pass the Senate’s version of a “rescission” bill that claws back $9 billion in funding approved by Congress last year. The bill makes most of Elon Musk’s illegal cuts to USAID and public broadcasting legal – a decision that will have immediate consequences for radio stations in rural communities and vulnerable people around the world.

But while headlines maintain their almost singular focus on how Trump is spinning his long-term relationship with a sexual predator, it’s worth pausing to consider the door Congressional leadership has opened with this decision. After their Big, Ugly Bill cut more than a trillion dollars for healthcare and nutrition assistance, a headline about $9 billion in cuts may seem like a relatively small slice in Republicans’ steady effort to hack down the entire federal government.

It is not.

This bill is a test-case for Russell Vought, the author of Project 2025 who Trump has charged with “dismantling the administrative state.” While Elon Musk sent shock troops into federal agencies to create chaos and interrupt normal operations early this year, Vought patiently developed a plan to implement Project 2025 by pressuring Congress to give up the power of the purse.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained how the bill that passed this morning would advance Vought’s plan:

If Senate Republicans go along with the Administration’s efforts to simply remove spending they had earlier agreed to… this would undermine the ability to strike future deals. Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has also indicated that the Administration “will strongly consider” sending further rescissions requests to Congress. And of course, the trust needed to make these deals is further undermined when the Administration also chooses to withhold money illegally without even submitting a rescissions package.

If the White House can “cancel” appropriations that were already approved by Congress, then Congress no longer maintains the power of the purse. They have ceded it to Russell Vought. And we know what Vought plans to do with that power. We know because Vought and his team at the Heritage Foundation wrote it all down in an 887 page plan.

In his chapter for Project 2025, Vought declared, “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch.” Vought has taken it upon himself to exercise those powers on Trump’s behalf, and with his first rescission package, he has secured most of the cuts Project 2025 calls for in chapters 8 and 9.

At a breakfast with reporters in DC this week, Vought was asked why the White House has still not released its budget proposal for next year – a budget Congress has to approve before October 1. “It would have been very chaotic and something that wasn’t in our interest to do,” he said, according to the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein.

On the campaign trail last year, Trump said he’d never heard of Project 2025. Embracing the details of his backers’ plan to dismantle the federal government was something that wasn’t then in his interest to do.

Nevertheless, once he was back in the White House he put Vought in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, and Vought has worked swiftly to get Congress to carry out the directives of two chapters of Project 2025 with this morning’s vote.

Telling the American people how many more chapters he aims to write into next year’s budget may be something that is not in the White House’s interest to do. But it is in our shared interest to pay attention to what is happening here.

The White House has claimed control of the federal budget and Congressional leadership has ceded that power to Vought. Vought is methodically pursuing the deconstruction of the federal government that Project 2025 proposed, and his billionaire backers are celebrating all the way to the bank.

We don’t need to wait for the details to come from the White House. The cuts to housing, environmental protection, workforce development, education, consumer protection, nutrition assistance, and healthcare proposed in Project 2025 are coming. Congressional leadership has abdicated their responsibility to Vought, and Vought will let us know which cuts come next when he considers it in the White House’s interest to do so.

If we take the time to see what is happening, we can notice how it rhymes with the worst moments in our history. After the Civil War, the Freedman’s Bureau set up a network of hospitals across the South to offer life-saving healthcare to formerly enslaved people in places where it had never existed before. This federal government initiative transformed possibilities for whole communities, not just the formerly enslaved. Many poor white people had access to a hospital for the first time in their lives. But forces determined to dismantle the administrative structures of Reconstruction defunded the Freedman’s Bureau. They appealed to divisive myths and said they were cutting waste, but when the hospitals closed, everyone in those communities who couldn't afford a private doctor lost access to healthcare. It is a story that has been repeated again and again by “anti-government” political movements.

As communities across the country today begin to feel the impacts of the Big, Ugly Bill, we are building a moral opposition that connects the pain and fear that immigrant communities feel in their communities with the anxiety of rural communities that will lose their hospitals and working adults who worry about aging parents getting kicked out of nursing homes. As Vought continues his cost-cutting crusade, the list of impacted communities will quickly include almost all Americans. Republicans who’ve capitulated to this extremism will try to run for re-election by relying on old divide-and-conquer tactics that deploy some wedge issue to pit people against one another.

Our job is to strengthen the bonds of moral conviction that help all Americans link arms across these divides and say, “If they are cynical enough to come after all of us, we must be smart enough to stand together in a united opposition.”

A moral movement in this moment must help people remember that the cruelty isn’t inevitable. There are more of us who oppose it than those who benefit from it. But extremists maintain power by pitting us against one another.

Our job is to stand with everyone who feels the pain and build a moral coalition committed to reconstructing the government that Vought and Co. are planning to tear down. We can do this best when we are clear-eyed about what is coming and present to the people who are already experiencing the pain of policy violence.

Pastor Joel Simpson experienced this firsthand with the Moral Monday delegation in North Carolina this week. (You can read his full account in the Gaston Gazette).

Almost a hundred people were gathering outside the Gaston County Courthouse in Gastonia when someone working there asked, “What is going on?”

“This is a Moral Monday gathering. Clergy and Moral Leaders are gathering in 11 southern states and lifting up the voices of people who will be impacted by the harm and injustice of the federal budget that Congress passed.”

The employee was shocked, “I am one of those people. I depend on SNAP to make ends meet each month!” 

They joined the chorus of people from Congressional District 14 to call on Representative Tim Moore to meet and explain why he voted for a budget that will harm his constituents by cutting Medicaid and SNAP funding all while providing more money for ICE agents to snatch up people and illegally deport them.

Millions of Americans like that courthouse employee in Gaston County are waiting for a moral movement of people who see their struggle and want to join with them to build an America that has never yet been. Vought is determined to use the power of the executive to tear down, but a new coalition of builders is coming together to reconstruct an America where everyone can thrive. In this moral moment, each of us must decide which proposed future we want.