Is Congress Giving Up Its Power of the Purse?
This week on Facing the Future, Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution discussed the possibility of a government shutdown in the fall and whether federal spending power is shifting away from Congress toward the executive branch. As an expert in the congressional budget process, she also had some observations about the future of the reconciliation process, used this year to pass the Republican’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
With only nine weeks left in Fiscal Year 2025, Congress has yet to pass any of the 12 annual appropriation bills needed to fund the government in Fiscal Year 2026. During much of that time the House and Senate will be in recess. This has already led to speculation about whether the government will be forced to close nonfunded agencies when the fiscal year ends on September 30. Alternatively, Congress can pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) keeping agencies funded temporarily while full-year funding negotiations continue.
“When they come back in September,” Reynolds noted, “both Chambers are really going to have to turn to this question of how do we keep the government open past September 30th?”
That question could become even more complicated than usual if the Trump Administration sends one or more new requests for rescission of previously approved spending. Congress recently approved a $9 billion rescission request with no support from Democrats and the Administration has indicated that it would send additional rescission requests, which under the process established in the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), can pass with a majority vote rather than the 60-vote supermajority required to overcome a Senate filibuster.
Reynolds explained why more rescission requests could undermine bipartisan negotiations. “What we saw with the rescissions package recently, and what might be contemplated for the future, is using these really targeted rescission bills that can move without the threat of a filibuster to try and undo bills with fewer votes than it took to pass them in the first place. Some Democrats in the Senate, including Senator Murray, who’s the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee was very clear before the Senate considered the rescissions package that doing this – agreeing to undo these choices that Congress had made collectively – stood to jeopardize the appropriations process, because who wants to do the hard work of making a bipartisan deal if you think that the either the Executive Branch simply isn’t going to implement those choices and is going to engage in illegal empowerments, or is going to try and use this recessions power to roll back specific things that you voted for as part of the original spending bill.”
Reynolds observed that the Trump Administration has taken an expansive view of the President’s authority to control spending and that Republicans in Congress have not shown much pushback. “For me,” she said, “one of the biggest and most important stories of the first six months of the second Trump Administration is the degree to which the White House and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have been really aggressively undermining Congress’s spending power. We know from both their behavior and things that OMB director Russell Vought has said, that there are loud and important voices in the Executive Branch that believe that under the President’s inherent constitutional powers is the ability to decide what the Executive Branch does with money that Congress has appropriated, including to cancel it. We are quite possibly headed for a real showdown over this and that showdown is likely to have consequences for the ability to keep the government open past September 30th when the current measure funding the Government runs out.”
Looking back on this year’s use of the reconciliation process to pass the OBBBA, Reynolds said, “we should think about this as just the next step in the evolution of reconciliation as a partisan tool for achieving a party’s policy priorities under unified party control.”
“But at this point,” she said, “one of the most important questions to ask about the reconciliation process is, what are its consequences for how we design policy. It has complicated rules and it’s a really attractive way to get things done because it gets around the filibuster. But to fit given policy goals in the cage that’s constructed by the rules of the process, majorities often have to contort those policies into clunky, inefficient and suboptimal policy approaches. So we might be getting where a party wants to go and has agreement to go policy-wise. But we’re getting there in some pretty ugly ways that can have consequences for good and responsible budgeting practices. I think that is an important thing to keep in mind.”
Hear more on Facing the Future. Concord Coalition Senior Advisor Bob Bixby hosts the program each week on WKXL in Concord N.H., and it is also available via podcast. Join us as The Concord Coalition team discusses issues relating to national fiscal policy with budget experts, industry leaders, and elected officials. Past broadcasts are available here. You can subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or with an RSS feed. Follow Facing the Future on Facebook, and watch videos from past episodes on The Concord Coalition YouTube channel.
