March 5, 2025

It took many centuries of advances, threats, retreats, and a Civil War before the English Constitution secured for Parliament the appropriations power – the power of the purse – what civics instructors teach as the fundamental right to spend taxpayer dollars. Throughout the Middle Ages, the eminent English historian Maitland explained, the appropriations power really did belong to the monarchy; the king’s revenue was the king’s revenue and Parliament seldom tried to tell him what to do with it. The consequence was that there was no accountability for the expenditure of public funds, often spent for arbitrary – indeed, disastrous and divisive  – purposes, typically in service to the king’s personal, political, and pecuniary interests, without any need to consult the representatives of the people.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 halted the practice, stripped the king of unconstrained authority, and formally etched in English law legislative supremacy on the expenditure of money. A member of Parliament grasped the historic importance of the transformation: “’tis money that makes a Parliament considerable & nothing else.”

President Donald Trump’s claim, in a stunning Executive Order issued on February 17, of constitutional power to withhold legislative funding for any projects and initiatives that he doesn’t like – that is, those which conflict with his preferences, policies, and priorities – represents a breathtaking assertion of the royal prerogative that was denied to English kings in the late 17^th Century, an ancient, discredited monarchical power that the American colonists rejected, and one that the Framers of Constitution thought repugnant to the principles of republicanism. Indeed, Article 1, Section 7 states: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”  

Trump’s impoundment of congressionally authorized funds to Ukraine, an appropriation by law pursuant to congressional policy to aid a beleaguered democratic ally in its defense against Russia’s invasion, like the billions of dollars that he has frozen and refuses to release, violates the Impoundment Act of 1974 and the Constitution, and represents a usurpation of power that would ground the presidency, not in the constitutional principles championed by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington, but rather the absolutist assertions of English monarchs in the Middle Ages.

On  March 1, 1793, then Rep. James Madison, justly known as the Father and Chief Architect of the Constitution, echoed the sentiments of his congressional colleagues when he concluded that, “appropriations of money,” by the representatives of the people, “were of a high and sacred character; that they were the great bulwark which our Constitution had carefully and jealously  established against executive usurpations.”  Madison was reiterating what he had written in Federalist 58, namely, that Congress held the purse. “The power over the purse,” he observed, represented “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

 Justice Joseph Story, the most scholarly of Justices, observed in his magisterial, three-volume, “Commentaries on the Constitution” (1833), that since “all taxes are raised from the people” and “applied to the discharge” of the nation’s expenses, debts, and engagements, “it is highly proper that Congress should possess the power to decide, how and when any money should be applied for these purposes.” If it were otherwise, Story wrote, in words that recalled the dreaded monarchical prerogative, “the executive would possess an unbounded power over the public purse of the nation; and might apply all its monied resources at his pleasure.” Congress, not the president, he declared, has been made by the Constitution, “the guardian of this treasure.” To make the congressional “responsibility complete and perfect,” the Constitution requires of the executive “a regular account of the receipts and expenditures,” so that the people “may know what money is expended, for what purposes and by what authority.”

Among their chief purposes, the American colonists fought a revolution, and the Framers drafted the Constitution, to protect what Madison called the “sacred” principle of congressional power over the purse. If Trump can establish the idea of policy impoundment at the pleasure of the president, he will succeed in upending the theory of the Constitution.

-David Adler