A Donor-Funded Army Wouldn’t Just Be Illegal—It Would be Dangerous

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President Donald Trump dropped the news casually at the very end of a White House roundtable this past Thursday. “A friend of mine”—he said the man preferred not to use his name—“he called us the other day, and he said, I’d like to contribute any shortfall you have because of the Democrat shutdown,” Trump said. The money would go to pay the armed forces while the government is closed. “Today, he sent us a check for $130 million.”

I am running out of words for astonishing, but I hope Americans are not running out of astonishment. This announcement is troubling in many ways, including the idea of a private individual funding the U.S. military—much less doing so anonymously. If allowed to stand, it will be the latest step on the road toward Congress’s irrelevance and the elevation of a near-monarchical presidency, whose holder can be swayed by influence and bribery but can’t be meaningfully checked by public oversight.

By the weekend, The New York Times had reported on the donor’s identity: Timothy Mellon, a reclusive heir to a huge fortune. He’s given millions to support Trump’s campaigns, as well as to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his Children’s Health Defense. Mellon’s cousin Richard Mellon Scaife poured millions into seeking dirt on President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Timothy’s grandfather, Andrew W. Mellon, was a businessman who became Treasury secretary during the administrations of Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover—accruing such power that a joke went that three presidents served under him.

Even without knowing that context, you don’t need a political-science degree to understand why having wealthy individuals cutting secret checks to the president to pay the military is a bad idea. First, it makes the administration dependent on a wealthy person to function—which hands that person influence over the president. Second, despite the fact that Trump acts as though, and seems to believe that, the armed forces (along with the White House and the rest of the federal government) belong to and answer to him personally, they do not. Funding the military via a private donor not accountable to Congress, voters, or anyone (especially if they are unnamed) raises the specter that the military might really become beholden to the president. If the nation isn’t paying the armed forces, then why should the armed forces answer to or protect them? And what’s to stop their might from being trained on the people?

In this case, the donation won’t really fund much. CNN notes that $130 million “is unlikely to make any meaningful impact toward covering salaries of the roughly 1.3 million active duty military troops, netting out to about $100 per service member.” But the price tag could be enough to influence Trump, who has openly solicited and received sums of money that look a great deal like bribes.

That’s one reason a law exists preventing this kind of thing. The Antideficiency Act, a long-standing statute, “prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation, and from accepting voluntary services.” I am not a lawyer, but that seems to pretty clearly describe the gift that Trump announced. The Pentagon confirmed the donation, saying it was permissible under the department’s “general gift acceptance authority,” and the White House has not provided further details. Assessing how much that matters is difficult when the purportedly textualist Supreme Court majority has been so willing to discard both plain meaning and reams of precedent.

The Antideficiency Act isn’t just designed to prevent corruption—it’s designed to avoid giving excessive power to the executive branch. The act was created to prevent the president from grabbing the constitutional spending power from Congress, for example by overspending through “coercive deficiency”: intentionally running out the budget at some agencies.

Shutdowns have become more common in recent years, but they have also become somewhat fake. Most shutdowns are only partial: So-called essential workers (a subjective determination) are required to keep working on the promise of back pay later, but administrations of both parties have also become adept at juggling money around to keep certain popular services going. That’s why Republicans had the appetite to force a record-length shutdown in 2018–19, and why Democrats were willing to start this one, which might break that record.

When the executive branch can start messing around with the money in the way Trump is, it has started to control the purse. The results are bound to be aimed at punishing political opponents and rewarding allies, and the people with the least political influence are the ones most likely to get shafted. In this case, Trump is looking for ways to keep the military funded via public donations, but the administration is also conspicuously announcing that it won’t use emergency funds to pay for food stamps starting on November 1, as it had previously planned to do. That’s a way to try to force Democrats into compromise, but it comes on the backs of the poor.

Ignoring the Antideficiency Act is of a piece with the Trump administration’s systematic effort—led by Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025—to take power away from Congress. Vought has endorsed impoundment, in which the White House simply refuses to spend money that legislators appropriated. This is flatly illegal under a 1974 law, as even Vought acknowledges—but he believes that the law is unconstitutional and hopes to get the Supreme Court to overturn it. Trump also avoided notifying the public or seeking funding from Congress before razing the White House’s East Wing last week, and he has collected corporate funds for the enormous ballroom he wants to build on the site. The administration is also trying to overturn a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent that insulates many regulatory agencies from presidential interference.

The best way to restrain the president—not just this one, but any future president of any party—from unchecked power is for Congress to actually assert the powers that it has. Republicans show no interest in corralling Trump, as he well knows. “I’m the speaker and the president,” he has joked recently, according to The New York Times. Democrats have little control in Congress, but they hoped a shutdown would place attention on Trump’s power grabs and perhaps lead to limits on them. As coverage of the Mellon donation and outrage over the East Wing demolition show, Trump’s actions are getting attention—but at the moment, he seems only encouraged to go further.

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A Wayne Thiebaud painting of a chocolate cake — Wayne Thiebaud / Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

The Mysterious, Enchanting Qualities of Chocolate

By Aleksandra Crapanzano

The dessert was a masterpiece: a dark-chocolate body so smooth it glistened, white-chocolate keys, minor notes of a chocolate so dark as to be almost black, foot pedals brushed in gold leaf. Its lid was propped open on a thin rod, revealing an interior of milk-chocolate mousse so light that it vanished on my tongue, leaving an echo that lingers more than 40 years later. Adding to the magic was a small chocolate stool. I spent a few moments studying the fine treble and bass strings drawn across the mousse with, I imagined, the tines of a small fork. Later, I carefully wrapped the stool in a napkin and brought it to our hotel. My hunger for fantasy prevailed over my appetite.

We were not in Switzerland for happy reasons. My father, following a car crash in Spain, had been transferred to the intensive-care unit at a hospital in Zurich. After long mornings at my father’s bedside, my mother and I arrived at Confiserie Sprüngli weary and afraid. She bore the mature burden of knowledge. I, however, was able, for an hour or so, to lose myself in the dream of my chocolate piano. How could tragedy occur in the face of such delicious perfection?

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