Top Republicans and Democrats quietly tucked new requirements into the government funding package Congress passed last week to make it more difficult for the Trump administration to defy lawmakers and refuse to allocate federal dollars in the way they intend.
The measures amount to a silent act of resistance by members of both parties against President Trump’s efforts to trample on Congress’s power of the purse, after a year in which his team repeatedly skirted and disregarded the legislative branch on spending matters, slashing programs and canceling whole funding streams they had approved.
They are sprinkled throughout all 11 spending bills that Mr. Trump signed into law last week. The new language was spearheaded mostly in the Senate, where Republicans have shown more appetite for protecting their spending prerogatives.
Many of the measures fall far short of what Democrats wanted, including provisions restricting departments from canceling federal contracts and barring the White House from unilaterally rescinding funds Congress already approved. In some instances, House Republicans rejected stronger language written by appropriators in the Senate.
And the requirements that survived, which are highly technical in nature, may lack the teeth to change the Trump administration’s behavior. They are the legislative equivalent of telling the White House that when Congress says it wants a certain amount of spending for a specific program or initiative, it really means it.
Still, the language reflects bipartisan frustration with how the White House has attempted to wrest away Congress’s spending powers, and a hope among appropriators that by writing new requirements into law, they will strengthen the legislative branch’s hand in any future legal battles with the executive branch over funding.
Some of the bills bar the shuttering of a federal office, such as one that directs that no funds allocated by Congress can be used to close research service labs run by the Agriculture Department, many of which the Trump administration proposed getting rid of. Others include specific spending amounts or instructions in their text that previously would have been written only in the nonbinding reports that accompany spending legislation, which previous administrations have generally honored as law.
Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has long been spoiling for an opportunity to litigate his belief that the levels set by Congress are a ceiling, not a floor, and that the 1974 law meant to restrict the president’s ability to defy Congress on spending is illegal.
Appropriators say the latest spending package was written with an eye toward challenging that view.
“These bills provide literally hundreds upon hundreds of specific funding levels and directives that this administration must now, by law, follow,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said. “That means that President Trump and his cabinet secretaries will not have the legal authority again to cut — or entirely defund — programs Congress, all of us, has funded, just to free up taxpayer dollars for their own priorities.”
Republicans have been mostly silent about the new spending requirements, focusing instead on aspects of the legislation that appeal to their base, including trimming budgets across agencies and writing and negotiating spending bills rather than simply using a yearlong stopgap measure. After Congress cleared the legislation, a number of Republican appropriators attended Mr. Trump’s signing ceremony in the Oval Office, where they held red caps emblazoned with the phrase “AMERICA IS BACK.”
“This marks an important milestone and shows that Congress can work together in a bipartisan manner to carry out our Article I responsibilities and deliver results for the people we are honored to represent,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said after the Senate passed the bills.
But last summer, when senators began spearheading the effort, Ms. Collins was explicit about what she said was a need for Congress to put a tighter rein on the administration’s spending decisions.
“In this administration,” she said then, “it is clear that we need to move far more of that language on how the money should be spent into the bills themselves.”
The legislation includes new staffing requirements across a slew of agencies that DOGE decimated — from the National Weather Service to the National Park Service to the Education and Labor Departments — to ensure they can meet their missions. That language was the product of negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, who were pushing for stronger language that would have forced those agencies to restore their staffing to Biden administration levels.
Lawmakers also included a requirement that the C.D.F.I. Fund, which provides money to community banks, credit unions and other financial lenders, spend a certain amount on staffing to keep the fund running. The Trump administration proposed eliminating the program in its last budget request and laid off all of its employees during the shutdown in the fall.
The spending law also requires agencies to award money by a certain date, a change that came after the administration in several instances held up funding. Last summer, the Trump administration abruptly announced that it would not send out nearly $7 billion in federal funding that helps pay for after-school and summer programs, a day before it was set to be released. The administration released the funds weeks later.
“As we were putting together this bill, it went from an isolated instance — ‘Let’s fix this and let’s fix that,’ to saying, ‘No, we really do have to work together to have across-the-board protections for congressional intent,’” Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the subcommittee that funds the Labor, Education and Health Departments, said in an interview. “I saw that sort of developing during the course of the year, as we saw the overreaches of this administration increase, but we certainly didn’t start there.”
There were limits, however, to the guardrails Republicans were willing to include. They ruled out trying to include any prohibitions on pocket rescissions, the practice of asking lawmakers to claw back funding so late in the fiscal year that the president’s timing triggers a law that freezes the money until it ultimately expires. The Trump administration used that practice to rescind roughly $4.9 billion in foreign aid funds last year.
Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, the top Republican overseeing the subcommittee that controls funding for the State Department and foreign aid programs, initially included language trying to safeguard his bill from pocket rescissions. But he ultimately nixed the provision after outreach from Mr. Vought. That back and forth was first reported by NOTUS.
And lawmakers ultimately jettisoned language that senators had tucked into the bill to fund the Commerce and Justice Departments that would have required administration officials to notify lawmakers 30 days before canceling federal contracts or enacting mass layoffs of federal employees.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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