How the president expanded his power without a government

When the government shutdown ends, Donald Trump will have succeeded in staging the single biggest expansion of presidential power in American history because of the single largest shift in the constitutional balance of powers ever. 

In fact, he (but more particularly, his team) has been so successful at maneuvering through this shutdown that there’s no reason for them to end it. Democrats have called on Trump to get more involved in the negotiations. They’ve gotten little more than a shrug in return. The Republicans are winning, and Vegas card players know never to leave a winning hand on the table. 

The Republicans are using two of the big tools to shape governmental action: the power of the purse, which funds what government does; and the power of government bureaucrats, who make it work. The former is the engine. The latter are the wheels. And by vastly expanding the administration’s leverage over both, it—especially OMB Director Russ Vought—is in the driver’s seat. 

This is vastly more important than Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, an unguided bulldozer rambling through government. Vought’s strategy is all out of a single piece of carefully woven cloth. 

Start with the engine: the federal budget. Madison, in Federalist #58, made it clear why the founders, concerned with the prospect of a strong executive, vested the power of the purse with the Congress. It was, he wrote, the “most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people”.  There are two vital components of this: the president cannot spend money for purposes not authorized in law; and that the president cannot pick which programs he wants to spend money on and on which he does not.  

There are laws, which Georgetown law professor Eloise Pasachoff has referred to as the “power of the purse statutes”, that reinforce each of those constitutional imperatives. The Anti-Deficiency Act, passed in 1870, creates penalties for the unlawful spending of money that has not been appropriated, or not appropriated for that purpose. The 1974 Impoundment Control Act creates the only legal avenue for the president to refuse to spend money that has been appropriated. The Vought strategy violates both.

For the first almost eight months of the administration, the sole emphasis has been on the latter set of violations. In most cases where the administration attempted to cancel programs, it did so without following the procedures set up by the ICA. In the shutdown, the administration has crossed the ADA lines 

With the deadline for the military’s payroll looming, Trump ordered the Pentagon “to use for the purpose of pay and allowances any funds appropriated by the Congress that remain available for expenditure in Fiscal Year 2026.” The administration said it was going to use funds in the Pentagon’s research and development account. DOD did indeed have unexpended R&D funds, but Congress had not authorized draining the R&D account to pay the military, and that’s a clear violation of the ADA. As Bobby Kogan at the Center for American Progress posted on Bluesky,  this mechanism “is by far the most illegal budgetary action he's taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything.”

How does it risk breaking everything? When the administration can both decide it can spend money from any budget account on anything it wants, AND that it does not have to spend money appropriated by Congress if it does not want to, there are no limits to the budgetary powers possessed by the president. This is exactly the kind of executive overreach that worried the founders. 

The Trump administration, as one of us has concluded, “appears to understand that control over the federal budget is central to control over the entire federal government.” The budget maneuvers mark a huge attack on the norms that have defined the constitutional  separation of powers for 238 years. 

Then let’s move to the wheels: government employees. DOGE had already virtually eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development, large parts of the Department of Education and other parts of the government deemed “woke.” 

But when the shutdown began, the firings ramped up. OMB had already asked for plans from agencies about employees who should be RIFed—fired through a “reduction in force.” The firings began with a short post from Vought, a few days into the shutdown: “The RIFs have begun.” He followed that up with more than 4,000 RIFs, and it took digging into a federal court filing to find out where they were occurring, since there was no transparency from OMB on this important step. 

It didn’t take long for a scramble to begin. The Department of Health and Human Services at first said that 982 people got RIF notices. Then word came that the notices went out to 1,760 employees, including 596 employees at the Centers for Disease Control, along with more workers at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Administration for Children and Families, among others. 

The administration used the RIF process to accelerate its planned shutdown of the Department of Education by laying off more employees. It slashed employment at the IRS by 1,446 people, on top of the 25 percent of the workforce who were DOGEd. In just a few days, the administration eliminated many workers at agencies that were at the bull’s eye of its strategy to transform the executive branch. 

With the purse nowhere to be found during the shutdown, Vought seized its power, and his decisions in the fog of the shutdown means there’s no accountability.  

The country’s founders had anticipated the risk of executive power but counted on Congress’s control of the power of the purse to rein in the irresistible instincts for expanding presidential power. One of the biggest champions of the executive, Alexander Hamilton, pointed to the importance of Congress’s role. “The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated,” he wrote in Federalist 78. But that only works if Congress chooses to exercise that command—and that it is actually meets to do so. 

As always, when the supporter of the Congress, Madison, and the champion of the executive, Hamilton, agree, there’s a very powerful lesson the founders teach us. They’d be aghast at the government that emerges from the shutdown. And given the way the ongoing battles are going for the administration, there’s no reason for the administration to settle the shutdown any time soon. 

Philip G. Joyce is professor of Public Policy and Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus, both at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. They have been working with colleagues on Reform for Results, a nonpartisan coalition of public policy experts dedicated to advancing the government’s mission within the American tradition of the rule of law.