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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

These people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse. I think that trying to find and exploit loopholes in the constitution breaks the spirit of the document and is traitorous to our form of government. But they don't care for our form of government, they want to undermine it because without government it increases billionaire's "freedom".

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The Minerva Research initiative was created by Bush’s defense secretary: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25482/chapter/3.

> The Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, motivated by the recognition that DoD was underutilizing the intellectual capital of university-based social scientists

Congress doesn’t specifically appropriate money for it. It looks like Congress appropriates money for the DOD’s Basic Research Office, and money is siphoned to this initiative by the executive branch.

EDIT: Corrected which administration.

> Obama’s defense secretary

Obama wasn’t president in 2008, not sure why you are mentioning him.

"in 2008" means during the Bush administration. The fact that Gates was selected as Obama's defense secretary as a bipartisan pick later means very little.

Good point. Corrected.

>These people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse.

I mean, until someone stops them, and as long as they get away with it, they did.

The really interesting part is what if the agencies were a product of a prior loophole? We seem to be several generations deep in tenuous interpretations, using loopholes to counteract other loopholes. For example, if the executive branch is tasked with carrying out the law, how can we have independent agencies not subject to the executive power in Article 2 Section 1? How do we ignore the 10th amendment on the tenuous interpretation of the interstate commerce clause? It's all a game.

I agreed with you until the last bit. I don’t think there’s a uniform “they” with a stable set of goals. All of the heritage foundation, Vance, Trump, Elon, congress, the Christian nationalists, etc I’m certain have different and probably often conflicting goals… that also shift constantly depending on the context.

It's foolishness to think many millions of voters don't also agree with these cuts. They don't value these programs.

With the vastness of the political spectrum and volume of voters, one can find "millions" of voters that support cuts to almost any program.

In some respects, I agree. But they aren’t touching much that voters do care about and that’s where the overwhelming majority of spending comes from. Every valid path to actually reducing debt pisses off most of the electorate. It’s “chasing” a noble goal with political theater. What’s happening now is a path to privatization of large swaths of current govt.

That's what representation in Congress is for, and why the Constitution specifies that Congress holds the power of the purse, not the president, and especially not an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest.

the purse is quite litteraly drawing a hard vacume its so empty. the power to suck money from the future at an ever increasing rate was never put to any proper scruteny, and hopefully, the experiment will now end, through the process of defunding anything and everything that is of zero practical and imediate utility.

And even on the other end of the political spectrum you'll find individuals and groups using loopholes or trying to use tactics/interpretations that suit their goals. This isn't something new. Pretty much any of these EOs have similar past ones that are either forgotten or were largely ignored because they happened one at a time. The scope and rate of change is just much higher now than in any memorable past (eg wouldn't count internment camps etc as they are too far past).

They aren’t the first. Obama: I’ve got a phone, and I’ve got a pen.

https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...

The article doesn't demonstrate Obama stealing Congress's power of the purse. Can you show me an example?

I'm quibbling with implications of "there's nothing new, they're both the same".

In the article he can sign an executive order to make college more affordable, but this is using Congress's budget allocation, and powers provided for the department of education though is it not?

Trump is literally dismantling departments approved by Congress, and using the budget in completely different areas as far as I can tell. He's not simply redirecting what X department should be doing, as compared to Obama.

Can you expand on this?

You're not actually responding to the comment by immediately drawing a comparison and saying nothing else. It's a lazy way of making comments.

On quick glance, the article you're citing doesn't support the equivalence of cutting already awarded funding as the current American executive is doing now. It talks about calling meetings.

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