So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
But the Congress never did that. You won't find an appropriations bill where Congress allocated $X to Harvard and $Y to Princeton, etc. In fact, it did the opposite. Under Title VI, it empowered the executive branch to withhold money based on civil rights violations. And regardless of your view on Presidential power vis-a-vis executive branch agencies, 42 USC 2000d-1 specifically subordinates federal agencies' rules, regulations, and orders pursuant to Title VI to the authority of the "President."
Trump is not using Title VI to justify withholding federal funding. He's just withholding federal funding and his minions are coming up with the justification after the fact. And even then, it's insufficient, because Title VI requires an investigation and a fair amount of procedure.
Who knew that driving off everyone who was good at their job would make the administration less competent?
Directly or indirectly the people of the United States have power over all three branches. One can easily make strong arguments that the problem here is both that Congress as abdicated its powers to the executive (rather than delegated), and that the people have ignored that Congress should retain those powers while focusing on the presidency as the important election to the exclusion of all others.
This has been going on for decades or longer.
>So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
Sure. Definitely means he can't spend it on something else. But how much wiggle room is in this? Does it say on which day, hour, and minute it must be spent? Sure, it's probably tied at least to the fiscal year (in which case it needs to be spent by September, one would suppose), but that's months away. Does allocating a budget imply that it needs to be spent at all? If some bureau or department fails to spend all of its budget, has the president somehow committed some treason-adjacent crime, or is that just thriftiness? Are these funds earmarked for specific universities? What if he just goes shopping for alternative recipients?
To say that he has no discretion at all is absurd, if that were the case then Congress would have mandated that these be automatic electronic bank transfers without any human intervention (or oversight). The nature of the job not only implies but practically demands some (if limited) discretion.
Yes, he has. It is not the presidents power to judge whether the money he spent in defiance of congress is sufficient, it is congress that holds this power. If congress thinks they should spend less, they can settle this by changing the budget. What would you say if the next democratic president simply refused to spend a single dollar assigned to ICE to "be thrifty"?
I'd be thrilled. There's $6 billion that they spend on DEA every year that I'd be happy if it was just pocketed by Trump and spent on hookers or something. Normalize this, please.
The perverse incentives people will defend so that they can obey the letter (but not the spirit) of the law are downright bizarre. You're all getting everything you deserve, too bad I'm getting it with you.
Trump is literally breaking the law but no one really cares to discuss that anymore since the gish gallop has be so quick this term.
If someone has more knowledge to contribute, that'd be most welcome.
Why do you assume that the person you're responding to is "jumping to conclusions." Feels like you're just ignoring what they have to say in the guise of "asking for more knowledge" when you don't actually know if they don't have the knowledge because of your own lack of expertise.
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Po...
Because they said “Trump is literally breaking the law.” That hasn’t been established yet.
I happen to be an attorney as well as a hacker, and I worked in a Federal district court, so perhaps give me the benefit of the doubt that I just might know what I’m talking about. If you have legitimate questions of your own, I’d be happy to try to answer them.
I do not imagine it is congruent with the law to simply fire all the staff and shut down USAID (or "merge" it into State).
The laws are all public and people are free to read that a few weeks ago, Congress directed the Executive to spend money as USAID for the statutory purposes behind USAID. That part is pretty clear.
With NSF grants, the question is whether the President can redistribute funding away from applicants affiliated with specific institutions he doesn’t like (my first approximation: probably).
With USAID, the question is whether the President has the authority to disband an entire Agency established and appropriated by Congress (22 U.S.C. 6563) (my first approximation: probably not).
With science funding grants, the administration likely has latitude to make some changes, but the specifics of that latitude are going to be embedded in a thicket of overlapping statutes of different vintages.
Without going through all the specific statutes, I relied on the suggestion that if they are okay breaking the law around USAID funding passed in March, they likely are not going to find religion and adhere to laws governing science funding. But I guess anything's possible.
The Fourth Circuit allowed the administration to proceed: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/28/appeals-court-usaid...
That is not a final word on the constitutionality of dissolving USAID, but it's an indication that the Court didn't believe plaintiffs had a high likelihood of success on the merits to justify the preliminary injunction.
Say a judge dismisses an indictment of an accused murderer because the police didn’t have a proper search warrant. Then the accused murderer kills someone else. That could fall within the letter of “negligent homicide” laws, but the judge can’t be prosecuted for that because judges have absolute immunity for official acts.
Similarly, a red state prosecutor could have tried to prosecute Biden for something like negligent homicide on the theory that his opening of the boarder was a negligent act that resulted in deaths. Obviously you can’t do that, because the President has immunity for official acts. It would be completely insane if the President didn’t have immunity. President do lots of things which cause people to be killed, property to be destroyed, etc. You could prosecute those as crimes if you literally applied the criminal laws.
If the Executive isn’t bound to follow federal appropriations laws, there’s no principled reason why he should have to follow other federal laws. And as you show, the president has full criminal immunity as well.
What other laws are there that might limit his conduct? I’m of the understanding that where we are now is the only potential check on Presidents going forward is impeachment and removal from office. It’s a blunt instrument, but apparently there are no other applicable mechanisms.
The primary check on the President is elections, not “the law.” Secondarily, there’s impeachment, and Congress’s power of the purse. Those are the main checks on the executive.
We have this 20th century conception of “the rule of law,” where we imagine this neutral, independent “justice system” as the base layer on top of which the elected branches operate. Like the lowest level of an operating system kernel. But if you look at the debates at the constitutional convention, and read the federalist papers and anti-federalist papers, that’s not the system the founders actually created. The founders didn’t trust anyone to neutrally enforce the law. You won’t find anywhere in those primary sources where the founders envisioned some “rule of law” where private litigants use the court to micromanage executive policy.
Instead, what we have is a game of rock-paper-scissors, where no branch is assumed to be “independent” and no branch is a “base layer of the operating system.” Courts can declare the law, but can’t force the President to do something. But if the President doesn’t listen to the court, he can be voted out of office, or impeached, or Congress can withhold funding for the administration. That is a complete system of checks and balances as it is.
Right, that's where this discussion started. What we are looking at right now is the erosion of that second piece, Congress's power of the purse. The Constitutional checks and balances (not the 20th-century stuff you detail) doesn't work as well without this key Article I power. I have not seen it explained under what principle this power of Congress has been arrogated instead to the Executive.
Marbury vs Madison established the judiciaries authority to review actions of the executive. That was in 1803.
Regarding rule of law, in that opinion:
> When the heads of the departments of the Government are the political or confidential officers of the Executive, merely to execute the will of the President, or rather to act in cases in which the Executive possesses a constitutional or legal discretion, nothing can be more perfectly clear than that their acts are only politically examinable. But where a specific duty is assigned by law, and individual rights depend upon the performance of that duty, it seems equally clear that the individual who considers himself injured has a right to resort to the laws of his country for a remedy.
1) Isn’t part of the founding sources I mentioned. It was quite controversial at the time.
2) Stands for exactly the opposite of what you’re arguing. Marbury goes to great lengths to disclaim any authority over executive policymaking and discretion, and limit courts to compelling executive officers to act only when the duties are specifically assigned by law and ministerial:
> This is not a proceeding which may be varied if the judgment of the Executive shall suggest one more eligible, but is a precise course accurately marked out by law, and is to be strictly pursued. It is the duty of the Secretary of State to conform to the law, and in this he is an officer of the United States, bound to obey the laws. He acts, in this respect, as has been very properly stated at the bar, under the authority of law, and not by the instructions of the President. It is a ministerial act which the law enjoins on a particular officer for a particular purpose.
And even after determining that delivery of the already executed commission is a ministerial act, the Court went out of its way to invoke a jurisdictional escape hatch to avoid actually enjoining an executive officer. A fair application of Marbury would preclude the sweeping powers courts have asserted to micromanage executive action in response to private litigation.
In Marbury, the court ruled that Marbury had already been appointed when the previous president signed his commission, and the only thing that remained was the purely ministerial act of the secretary of state delivering the signed letter that was sitting in the president’s desk. But even then, the Court found a way to avoid compelling the secretary of state to actually deliver the commission! How would the Marbury court view the prospect of a district court ordering the president to turn around military planes being used to deport an admitted El Salvadoran citizen? Or district courts ordering the President to reach out to a foreign country’s president to demand the return of that foreign country’s citizen! The Marbury court wouldn’t have dreamed of it!
What Marbury stands for is that the judicial branch can declare the legality of laws and executive actions, but should bend over backwards to avoid actually compelling the executive to perform any action.
If he chooses to continue to ignore the law, the solution isn't the courts. It's the Second Amendment, which was added to the Bill of Rights as a check on exactly this (though the Founders intended for it to be exercised through the States' militias, not the citizens directly, based on the text of the first half of the amendment).
And, to be honest, I’m not really sure that a bunch of unorganized wingnuts that slobber all over their big-man toys are going to prevail over the National Guard, if the latter remain loyal to the President, and a lot of innocent lives will probably be lost due to militia incompetence.
Trump isn't following the laws at all. He's simply issuing "executive orders" without regard to the powers or limitations of the executive as stated by the Constitution or the U.S. Code. Almost every single one of his executive orders during his second term violates a Constitutional prohibition in some way, and now that the initial shock to the system is over you're seeing judges overturn almost all of his orders...Even judges appointed by Trump during his first term are starting to overturn his executive orders.
So Trump's response was to call for the arrest of these judges. And to hint that violence would be appropriate way of removing them from.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If Trump gets killed by a mob this term, it's going to be because he kept suggesting that violence was the way to deal with his opponents.
So, Trump taking money from Harvard and giving it to say, a community college in Tampa is technically still correct implementation of the law. I mean, it all depends if he can defend his decision in court, because of course he cannot discriminate based on race, ethnicity, political affiliation etc.
How corrupt do you want a nation to be?
We used to have a shared sense of custom and mores that helped preserve this stability. But that seems to be out the window now, and regrettably so.
If Congress wants to fund something specific, they need to pass a law or budget that names that specific thing and how much they are appropriating. They aren't doing that.