Mad King Trump Seizes Your Money

[Passages]

The president is doing almost exactly what Charles I did to touch off the English Civil War.

by Ryan Cooper, David Dayen October 17, 2025

One of the few things that tends to stick in high school civics class is that Congress has the power of the purse. Article I, Section 7 reads: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives,” while Section 9 emphasizes that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

That’s yet another part of the Constitution that Trump is fully flushing down the toilet, and arguably the most important one. We’ve written before about how he is spending money on all kinds of things without congressional authorization, with the open support of the corrupt Republican hacks on the Supreme Court. Now, with the government formally shut down and no end in sight, Trump has ramped up this practice, to cover for how the unwillingness to negotiate with Democrats has real-world consequences. It is revealing that Trump wants to hide the impact of the shutdown, and it suggests that he knows he would be held responsible.

Some of these tactics are at least colorably legal. For instance, there is a way to use a portion of tariff funds as an auto-appropriation for agricultural purposes, under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935. So Trump is shifting that money to keep the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program going. Another scramble uses fee revenue to keep small airports open under the Essential Air Services program.

But when Trump decided that he had to pay military servicemembers, he directly violated congressional statute. It is “by far the most illegal budgetary action he's taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything,” writes Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. “The mechanism through which Trump is paying the troops is the most blatant large Antideficiency Act (ADA) violation in US history.”

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-10-17-trump-congress-constitution-revenue/