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0 pointssomeothherguyy1y ago0 comments

There are some hints toward this, like with recent reporting :

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-panel-ap...

> Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 trillion doesn’t leave a lot of room for the president’s priorities,” Malliotakis said

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Also, why else would you directly reclaim funds as the executive? As a party, if you wanted to correct spending, you would do it in a budget. As the executive, if you wanted to get money without congressional approval, you would reclaim money that has already been appropriated. There are other ways (emergency orders), but they might not be popular with the party or a target voting base (in this case, more net spending).

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roenxi1y ago

It is the US Government. Nobody has minded funding their schemes since 1970. They're going to keep borrowing until something so terrible happens that they literally cannot borrow any more. It is a bipartisan consensus position that spans multiple powerful governing ideologies.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party actually cared about the debt or intended to make meaningful improvements to the situation we'd have seen evidence of it in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s.

I'd love to be wrong, but there is pretty strong evidence here that they're going to tut-tut; maybe wag a finger or even in extreme situations someone will write a strongly worded letter. Then the government will borrow whatever they need to to pay for whatever hare-brained scheme is flavour of the month.

PaulRobinson1y ago

The problem here is that gilt rates have been on the rise for a year (most likely as a reaction to Trump's manifesto), meaning borrowing is getting more and more expensive. You can print more money, but that devalues the currency, which the USD has managed to shirk off by being the main reserve currency of the planet. Except, that might change soon - because of the seeming chaos of the Trump administration (based on experiences of the previous administration), people are eyeing up EUR as a safer place, and gold prices are moving in a direction that suggests people want out of dollars (even if gold is normally denominated in USD for most people).

Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.

If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.

I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.

someothherguyyOP1y ago

I made this comment before digging deeper into appropriations impoundment.

However, it still seems plausible (in my limited understanding) that this strategy could still be the goal, if the goal is to first push appropriations impoundment to SCOTUS.

Here is the best cited and approachable article I found on the subject within the context of these events:

https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-overlooked-conundrums-of-imp...

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