Could Trump use impoundment to skate around Congress?

President-elect Donald Trump might be looking to add a long-dormant tool back into the executive branch's arsenal, and it could allow him to circumvent checks on his power by Congress: impoundment. This little-known executive move occurs when the president refuses to spend money that Congress has already allocated, giving the president unilateral power over the federal budget.

One reason many people may be unfamiliar with impoundment is that it has mostly been illegal since 1974; that year, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act to "prevent the president and other government officials from unilaterally substituting their own funding decisions for those of the Congress," said the House Committee on the Budget. However, Trump said several times during his 2024 campaign that he would use impoundment to implement budget cuts, claiming the law that prevents impoundment is unconstitutional.

The incoming president already tried to use impoundment during his first term when he blocked aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unless he opened an investigation into Joe Biden. While this act led to Trump's first impeachment, pundits are wondering whether impoundment could play a major role in Trump's next go-around.

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What did the commentators say?

Even with the GOP controlling both chambers of Congress, impoundment "threatens to provoke a major clash over the limits of the president's control over the budget," said Franco Ordoñez at NPR. One of Trump's major projects as president-elect has been the establishment of a federal commission aimed at cost-cutting led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

If Trump, Musk or Ramaswamy "were to assert a power to kill congressionally approved programs, it would almost certainly tee up a fight in the federal courts and Congress and, experts say, could fundamentally alter Congress' bedrock power," said Molly Redden at ProPublica. Impoundment would be an "effort to wrest the entire power of the purse away from Congress, and that is just not the constitutional design," Eloise Pasachoff, a Georgetown Law professor, said to ProPublica.

Trump faced hurdles and an impeachment over impoundment in his first term. But this time, if Trump were to mount a major effort to overturn the impoundment law, he "might think he'll fare well challenging impoundment at the Supreme Court, which now leans to the right and is skeptical of the federal bureaucracy," said Zachary B. Wolf at CNN. But even among GOP politicians who support Trump, it "does not take a leap of faith to guess that even many Republican lawmakers may not want to cede the power of the purse back to the White House."

Given the aforementioned court challenges, it would likely take a long time before impoundment could be legally used in the way Trump suggests. However, if the Supreme Court overturned the impoundment law, it "could set the precedent that presidents can effectively cut spending without Congress, which could have vast, far-reaching implications for everything from health care to defense to science," said Dylan Matthews at Vox.

What next?

Trump himself spoke several times about impoundment during his campaign. "I will do everything I can to challenge the Impoundment Control Act in court, and if necessary, get Congress to overturn it," the president-elect said in a 2023 campaign video. "I will then use the president's long-recognized impoundment power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings," adding that impoundment "is the only way we will ever return to a balanced budget."

Reinstating impoundment powers isn't a new idea, and has been supported in the past by presidents from both parties. But politicians are bound to be skeptical. If something "further weakens Congress' ability to do its job the way they should be, then I'm going to look at that real carefully," Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) said to Business Insider.

Congress "can't just be pushed aside," Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) said to Business Insider. Members of Congress are "always very mindful of the fact that this court has broken tradition on a whole host of issues, whether it's reproductive rights or immunity," but "when we talk about how the American people have not elected a king — we don't have a sovereign — this is what we're talking about."