Steve Bannon’s call from eight years ago for a “deconstruction of the administrative state” is back on.
Back in November, Matt Glassman of Georgetown University warned against “potentially the biggest executive threat to the separation of powers of them all”. He was talking about violating the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which makes it illegal for the president to simply refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated. Shortly after the election, the newly announced heads of the “Department of Government Efficiency”, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Trump regarded the act as unconstitutional. There is no reason to see this week’s backtracking as a change of mind, rather than a mere tactical retreat.
The federal spending freeze was, in other words, the opening salvo of a huge constitutional battle over the separation and balance of legal power in the US, in which Trump and his team are aiming to shift as much power from the legislative to the executive branch of government. That is of a piece with their support for the “unitary executive” theory which rejects limits on the president’s authority over the entire executive branch.
This assault on both Congress’s power of the purse and on the US’s administrative state is as much of a self-coup as was the spurring of insurrectionists on January 6 2021.
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