MAKE IMPOUNDMENT GREAT AGAIN — The Trump administration’s move to freeze all federal aid payments last week seemingly came out of nowhere, catching Washington off guard and sowing confusion through the federal ranks. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise: the order was the culmination of a multi-year campaign by allies of President Donald Trump to turn presidential impoundment authority — the executive branch’s power not to spend money that has been appropriated by Congress — into a weapon in the MAGA movement’s fight against the federal bureaucracy. The administration has since rescinded the Office of Management and Budget memo implementing the freeze, which, though not technically an instance of full-on impoundment, was still swifty enjoined by multiple federal courts. But the persistence with which Trump’s allies have pursued this legal fight strongly suggests that the story will not end there. The White House’s immediate move to freeze federal aid payments may be on ice for now, but its broader fight to gain greater control over the power of the federal purse remains very much ongoing. The saga over impoundment authority dates back to the first Trump administration and has been led by one primary protagonist: Russ Vought, Trump’s chief budget wonk, who is currently awaiting confirmation as the new administration’s OMB director. Close observers of Trump’s first term may recall that the administration’s efforts to control funds already appropriated by Congress was at the heart of Trump’s first impeachment, which centered on his alleged decision to delay military aid to the government of Ukraine. But even after the drama of that event, Vought, who led OMB during the final two years of Trump’s first term, spearheaded a broader effort to re-claim impoundment authority for the executive branch. That campaign centered on the Impoundment Control Act, a law passed by Congress in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal to place restrictions and conditions on the president’s ability to commandeer funds. In the final days of Trump’s first term in 2021, Vought and his general council, Mark Paoletta, sent a lengthy letter to Congress criticizing the ICA and calling on Congress to reform it to “more fully empower the Executive Branch … to efficiently and effectively manage taxpayer dollars.” In their letter, Vought and Paoletta argued that their proposal was “not a radical approach,” but the move was generally in line with Vought’s record of aggressive opposition to federal spending — as well as his pugilistic brand of small-government conservatism. A veteran of the Tea Party movement who got his start at the lobbying arm of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, Vought had called for deep cuts to federal programs, including to Medicare and Medicaid. Paoletta, an under-the-radar career attorney with deep ties to the Federalist Society and the conservative legal movement, shared Vought’s hard-charging approach. The duo sharpened that approach at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank that Vought founded in 2021 and where Paoletta came on as a fellow. At CRA, Vought and Paoletta didn’t merely rely on their earlier argument that the ICA was ineffective. Instead, they started road-testing the idea that the law was actually unconstitutional. Beginning in June 2024, CRA began publishing a series of papers laying the legal and intellectual foundations for a challenge to the ICA. The first, co-authored by Paoletta, covered the pre-1974 history of presidential impoundment, arguing — in terms that seemed tailor-made to appeal to the originalists on the Supreme Court — that impoundment authority was “well within constitutional understanding and practice going back to the Founding.” In a subsequent memo, published in September 2024, Paoletta laid out the broader constitutional argument against the ICA and in favor of broad impoundment authority vested in the executive branch. (A spokesperson for CRA declined to comment.) In a social media post a year earlier, Vought summed up CRA’s approach: “Make Impoundment Great Again!” The Trump campaign appeared to be on the same page. In June 2023, the campaign added a page to its official website laying out Trump’s plans to “[Use] Impoundment to Cut Waste, Stop Inflation, and Crush the Deep State.” Notably, the basis for Trump’s impoundment plan was nowhere to be found in either of the two major policy blueprints that were then floating around Washington’s conservative policy sphere — the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy book and the America First Policy Institute’s “America First Agenda.” Instead, it appeared to be borrowed directly from Vought’s inchoate playbook. Now that Trump is in power and Vought is set to return to OMB, that playbook is being put into action — to mixed effect. Although the federal courts have stepped in to stop OMB from implementing its broad spending freeze, that move may in fact serve Vought’s plans: As the Huffington Post reported last week, internal OMB documents suggest that the department is intentionally seeking out a legal fight over impoundment with the hope that the Supreme Court will ultimately strike down the ICA. But even amid the confusion over the OMB order, one thing seems certain in light of Vought’s multi-year crusade on impound: None of this is happening by accident. As one GOP aide told POLITICO’s Rachael Bade last week, the spending freeze “has Russ’s name written all fucking over it.” That means that even as the impoundment fight is overshadowed by the administration’s other efforts to assert control over the federal bureaucracy, it won’t be long before it comes roaring back. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at iward@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports.
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