Slashing Spending

A quick primer

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are full of confidence that they can slash government spending and shut down lots of things the government does. We’ll see! Three points about it:

First, they can’t really do anything from their advisory commission. They can make suggestions, although it seems for now that their suggestions are basically just fringe Republican boilerplate.

Then it gets more complicated. Trump wants to be able to do things without any constitutional constraints, and a lot of Republicans want him to be able to do so. Whether he can, however, is unknown. For example, Musk and Ramaswamy and other Republicans are floating “impoundment” (see an Andrew Rudalevige explainer) — the idea that a president can just refuse to spend money that Congress told him to spend (in appropriations bills that the president signed). The problem with it is that it’s illegal. At least unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise. As Matt Glassman says, that would be a huge restructuring of the US constitutional system. It might happen. It might not. And the same goes for pretty much all the loopholes and re-interpretations that Republicans have been dreaming up to give presidents authority the Framers never intended.

(We’re going to see this a lot. Trump clearly wants to use extraordinary, basically authoritarian measures in which he can govern by decree; a lot of Republicans have specific things they want that they can’t get any other way and are fine with derailing democracy to get them; and we just aren’t going to know whether the usual rules apply or not until they are tested in specific case after specific case).