Congress’s Power of the Purse?
Josh Huder | April 14, 2025
Congressional appropriations are having a year. The second Trump administration kicked things off by engaging in a spree of unconstitutional impoundments of congressionally appropriated funds. The Republican Congress followed that up with a rarity: a full-year Continuing Resolution to finish out the fiscal year: unusual in itself, but in covering all appropriations bills, truly rare; Congress has only done this twice before. Continuing Resolutions (CRs) keep agencies at the same spending level as the previous fiscal year – with some slight alterations, known as anomalies. With spending on auto-pilot, that prevents Congress from adjusting programs, tweaking funding to meet upcoming goals, conducting oversight, or otherwise managing government programs with any specificity. In short, it’s a mess.
Not Just Nontraditional but Unconstitutional
It is also a constitutional shock. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Why, then, are the President and OMB making spending decisions while Congress looks on idly? Put briefly, this was one of the most partisan spending decisions in modern history. That alone is nothing to write home about. Partisanship in Congress has reached a fever pitch the last decade. But for appropriations, it is a big departure from the norm and comes with an added cost of ceding a core constitutional power to the President. The Madisonian system was created for the ambitions of separate institutions to counteract one another. However, in today’s nationalized partisan environment, majorities are more likely to relinquish their institutional prerogatives than undermine a president from their party. In this sense, executive aggrandizement over the last two decades is just as much a a function of congressional inaction as it is delegated authority.
This comes with a cost. Congress’s increasingly partisan tendencies undermine its representative character. When members act on national partisanship alone, they often forfeit their individual power to advance their constituents’ distinct interests. A “red” district on the Montana prairie differs dramatically from a “red” district in the South Carolina low country. Members of the same party hold divergent priorities and pursue different interests depending on who they represent. Being a partisan team player, on the other hand, entails suppressing these personal or district-focused goals. Partisan appropriating may have avoided some short-term pain (i.e. shutdown) early in President Trump’s second term, but its long-term consequences have implications for congressional power and its representational role.
Traditionally Bipartisan Appropriations
Congressional appropriations have a very bipartisan history. This tradition is particularly strong on the House and Senate appropriations committees because members drawn to them were more likely in pursuit of political power. In the context of appropriations, power is both institutional and personal. It is institutional in that it exerts independent influence over the executive agencies by increasing or decreasing their budgets. It is personal in that exercising spending authority gives appropriators power inside the chambers. Appropriators can bolster or sink programs, fund or defund new facilities, and greenlight or cut specific projects. This authority gives appropriators enormous authority because other members are constantly asking for favors, policies, or provisions.
Passing appropriations bills enables committee members to build political capital via spending decisions. Thus, the main goal of the Appropriations Committee in any given fiscal year was to pass their bills – not because failing to do so would result in a shutdown but because passing their legislation enhanced their institutional and personal power. For this reason, appropriations politics traditionally transcended partisanship. Old adages on Capitol Hill reflect that history. Members often say, “There are Republicans, Democrats, and appropriators”; subcommittee chairs are referred to as “Cardinals,” as if their status reflected that of powerful Catholic leaders; and Appropriations has been called “the favor factory,” all of which reflect the committee’s unique responsibility and authority.
Contemporary partisanship has strained that tradition. The profoundly broken budget process has derailed the traditional appropriations processes. Today, the committees are often unable to pass even one of the twelve regular appropriations bills, which haven’t been passed individually into law in over a decade. An abundance of poison pill amendments have effectively ended open deliberation on appropriations. The budget process – which is intended to initiate the appropriations process by ratifying the amount of discretionary spending in a given year – is rarely used for appropriations at all. Instead, today’s budget resolutions are merely a means to unlock the reconciliation process to enact parts of a presidential agenda without a filibuster. Partisanship has broken some of the very mechanics that have long enabled appropriators to exert influence.
More Recent History Before 2025: Still Within Constitutional Norms
Yet even as these processes broke down over the last two decades, appropriations remained largely bipartisan. Intense partisan and intra-party spending battles of the last 15 years eventually yielded to bipartisan deals and legislation, though it has required a more circuitous route. The austerity politics that birthed the Budget Control Act of 2011 were superseded by biennial, bipartisan deals to lift the caps, ratified by large bipartisan coalitions. This often meant greater involvement of party leadership in order to assure passage. Appropriations bills are clumped into omnibus, minibus, and “CRomnibus” packages to ensure bipartisan support. Congressional leaders now skip the budget process altogether in favor of shutdown-instigated bipartisan, bicameral negotiations. These adaptations to the partisan political environment have come with costs to agencies, but they had at least preserved bipartisan appropriations deals. As a result, Congress ratified spending that contravened presidentially proposed cuts or spending bumps to State, EPA, Defense, Army Corps, and a huge number of other agencies and programs. This is traditional and as it should be: while the President proposes a budget, it is Congress’s role to write the actual legislation. The committee’s goal to – in Richard Fenno’s words – “find a balance” and secure support from across the aisle bolstered the power of Congress and of the committee members who drafted and deliberated the legislation.
Where We Are Now: Uncharted Waters
This history is a stark contrast to this year’s spending deal. Democrats refused to agree to any deal that did not limit President Trump’s impoundments. Rather than negotiate new appropriations bills, House Republicans decided to essentially cede their spending authority to the president on a party line vote (save for Democrat Rep. Jared Golden (ME-02)). With Minority Leader Schumer and 9 other Democrats unwilling to filibuster the bill, the year-long continuing resolution passed in March with only 217 votes in the House and 54 votes in the Senate. This was a huge historical departure from congressional appropriations normally enacted with bipartisan supermajorities.
The consequences of this partisan turn away from congressional appropriating – and the implicit backing of unprecedented presidential encroachment on government spending – weakens constituents’ connection with their representation in government. The framers gave Congress the power of the purse for a variety of reasons, one of which is they knew a president could not possibly represent the varied interests of a diverse nation. Congressional appropriations are a major way representatives deliver for constituents. Funding agencies and government activities boosts jobs and local economies, often in rural areas. Pork barrel projects modernize hospital infrastructure, fix bridges, mitigate erosion, build electric-grid resilience, preserve watersheds, maintain military facilities, build airport capacity, and more. Winning projects and passing appropriations were once the staple of ambitious members seeking to secure reelection. But if partisan impulses prevent legislators from exercising their authority over the purse, then Congress’s constitutional power is not the only thing at stake. Constituents’ connection to their government will have also weakened as a result.
As the fiscal year 2026 budget and appropriations cycle begins, questions about Congress’s role in government spending loom. The future of government spending has never been so uncertain. Congress can theoretically reassert itself at any point. However, that is likely only if bipartisan appropriations break through partisan politics. The Constitution has not changed. It remains to be seen if the politics will.
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