So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
But the Congress never did that. You won't find an appropriations bill where Congress allocated $X to Harvard and $Y to Princeton, etc. In fact, it did the opposite. Under Title VI, it empowered the executive branch to withhold money based on civil rights violations. And regardless of your view on Presidential power vis-a-vis executive branch agencies, 42 USC 2000d-1 specifically subordinates federal agencies' rules, regulations, and orders pursuant to Title VI to the authority of the "President."
Trump is not using Title VI to justify withholding federal funding. He's just withholding federal funding and his minions are coming up with the justification after the fact. And even then, it's insufficient, because Title VI requires an investigation and a fair amount of procedure.
Who knew that driving off everyone who was good at their job would make the administration less competent?
Directly or indirectly the people of the United States have power over all three branches. One can easily make strong arguments that the problem here is both that Congress as abdicated its powers to the executive (rather than delegated), and that the people have ignored that Congress should retain those powers while focusing on the presidency as the important election to the exclusion of all others.
This has been going on for decades or longer.
>So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
Sure. Definitely means he can't spend it on something else. But how much wiggle room is in this? Does it say on which day, hour, and minute it must be spent? Sure, it's probably tied at least to the fiscal year (in which case it needs to be spent by September, one would suppose), but that's months away. Does allocating a budget imply that it needs to be spent at all? If some bureau or department fails to spend all of its budget, has the president somehow committed some treason-adjacent crime, or is that just thriftiness? Are these funds earmarked for specific universities? What if he just goes shopping for alternative recipients?
To say that he has no discretion at all is absurd, if that were the case then Congress would have mandated that these be automatic electronic bank transfers without any human intervention (or oversight). The nature of the job not only implies but practically demands some (if limited) discretion.
Yes, he has. It is not the presidents power to judge whether the money he spent in defiance of congress is sufficient, it is congress that holds this power. If congress thinks they should spend less, they can settle this by changing the budget. What would you say if the next democratic president simply refused to spend a single dollar assigned to ICE to "be thrifty"?
I'd be thrilled. There's $6 billion that they spend on DEA every year that I'd be happy if it was just pocketed by Trump and spent on hookers or something. Normalize this, please.
The perverse incentives people will defend so that they can obey the letter (but not the spirit) of the law are downright bizarre. You're all getting everything you deserve, too bad I'm getting it with you.
Trump is literally breaking the law but no one really cares to discuss that anymore since the gish gallop has be so quick this term.
If Congress wants to fund something specific, they need to pass a law or budget that names that specific thing and how much they are appropriating. They aren't doing that.
So, Trump taking money from Harvard and giving it to say, a community college in Tampa is technically still correct implementation of the law. I mean, it all depends if he can defend his decision in court, because of course he cannot discriminate based on race, ethnicity, political affiliation etc.
If someone has more knowledge to contribute, that'd be most welcome.
I do not imagine it is congruent with the law to simply fire all the staff and shut down USAID (or "merge" it into State).
The laws are all public and people are free to read that a few weeks ago, Congress directed the Executive to spend money as USAID for the statutory purposes behind USAID. That part is pretty clear.
Why do you assume that the person you're responding to is "jumping to conclusions." Feels like you're just ignoring what they have to say in the guise of "asking for more knowledge" when you don't actually know if they don't have the knowledge because of your own lack of expertise.
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Po...
