DeLauro Washington Post Letter to the Editor
Regarding the Jan. 13 editorial, “Thumbs ups and thumbs downs on Trump’s picks”:
Every incoming president, whether Republican or Democrat, deserves some level of deference when filling their Cabinet. But when a nominee has vowed to dismantle and destroy institutions and publicly plans to violate the law, the Senate must wield its advice and consent power to prevent the country from running headfirst into a constitutional crisis.
The Editorial Board was spot-on in giving Russ Vought, President-elect Donald Trump’s selection to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a “thumbs down,” given Vought’s “plans to violate federal law by ignoring the Impoundment Control Act and not spend money appropriated by Congress.”
Vought has a radical plan to destroy and dismantle Congress’s investments in our families’ health, safety and prosperity through “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch,” as he threatened in Project 2025. To reach these ends, Vought plans to abuse spending laws by operating as though the president has unchecked, unilateral power to deny funds provided in law for American families and businesses.
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, and nowhere does it give the president any unilateral impoundment power. Yet Vought plans to usurp Congress’s spending power for executive branch agencies, substituting the executive branch’s views for those of Congress.
The Supreme Court and the Justice Department have resoundingly debunked this wild constitutional theory that would turn Congress’s Article I power of the purse on its head.
One need look no further than the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, who took aim at presidential assertions of alleged impoundment power with Clinton v. City of New York in 1998, when he wrote that President Richard M. Nixon “asserted at a press conference in 1973 that his ‘constitutional right’ to impound appropriated funds was ‘absolutely clear.’ … Our decision two years later in Train v. City of New York proved him wrong.”
The president has a constitutional duty to take care that all laws be faithfully executed, and the president cannot faithfully execute the laws by refusing to execute some of them. Anyone who needs these remedial lessons is unfit to serve as OMB director. Indeed, Vought’s plans are entirely antithetical to the position, which oversees the execution of appropriations laws across the entire executive branch.
The Senate should act accordingly.
Rosa DeLauro, New Haven, Connecticut
The writer, a Democrat, represents Connecticut’s 3rd Congressional District and is the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee.