On Monday, US District Judge Amir Ali ruled against the Trump Administration in an important case involving control over the spending power. The court held the administration could not withhold payments from foreign aid contractors, that had been allocated by Congress. The issues in the case go far beyond the relatively modest sums of money immediately at stake. Indeed, this is just one of many cases where the administration is being sued for illegally withholding funds, in defiance of Congress. Judge Ali has a valuable summary of the broader constitutional principle involved:
The provision and administration of foreign aid has been a joint enterprise between our two political branches. That partnership is built not out of convenience, but of constitutional necessity. It reflects Congress and the Executive's "firmly established," shared constitutional responsibilities over foreign policy, Zivotofsky ex rel. Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 576 U.S. 1, 62 (2015) (Roberts, C.J., dissenting), and it reflects the division of authorities dictated by the Constitution as it relates to the appropriation of funds and executing on those appropriations. Congress, exercising its exclusive Article I power of the purse, appropriates funds to be spent toward specific foreign policy aims. The President, exercising a more general Article II power, decides how to spend those funds in faithful execution of the law….
This case involves a departure from that firmly established constitutional partnership. Here, the Executive has unilaterally deemed that funds Congress appropriated for foreign aid will not be spent. The Executive not only claims his constitutional authority to determine how to spend appropriated funds, but usurps Congress's exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place. In advancing this position, Defendants offer an unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected—a view that flouts multiple statutes whose constitutionality is not in question, as well as the standards of the Administrative Procedure Act ("APA"). Asserting this "vast and generally unreviewable" Executive power and diminution of Congressional power, Defendants do not cite any provision of Article I or Article II of the Constitution….
