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From first principles, congress is given power of the purse. If the president can just ignore congress' direction and refuse to use the money they allocated, do

• skissane 2y ago
  From first principles, the American Founding Fathers were largely copying the design of the British system (as they understood it), but with an elected President replacing the King. In the British system, Parliament could stop the King from spending money – but the power was about stopping the King from spending as he liked, not forcing him to spend when he didn't wish to. The English Civil War was fought over the principle that the King couldn't spend money without Parliament's authorisation; the issue of Parliament trying to force the King to spend money when he didn't want to spend it simply never came up. Hence, look at the Appropriations Clause of the US Constitution (Article I Section 9 Clause 7): "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law..." That's a negative clause, a prohibition on the Executive spending money without legal authorisation; nowhere does it explicitly say that Congress can force the President to spend money when he doesn't want to spend it. For most of the term's history, "the power of the purse" was understood as the ability of the legislature to limit government spending; the idea that it also entails the ability of the legislature to compel the executive to spend money which it doesn't wish to spend is much newer.