Since March, Vice President JD Vance has been tasked with rooting out any fraud perpetrated against the federal government. “This is a very big thing that we’re doing,” President Trump said when he announced the task force. “If we found half of the fraud that’s taking place in this country — and I think you have a chance of doing that — we would have much more than a balanced budget.”
The White House says that since then it has “uncovered” hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and “stopped” tens of billions in ongoing fraud. But, as my newsroom colleague Linda Qiu notes in a recent report, “It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total.” And while fraud is real, there has been no independent verification of the administration’s claims. They’re asking us, in short, to take their word for it.
Last week, in a news conference with Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the vice president announced a new quarry in his hunt: an alleged 750,000 people fraudulently enrolled in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. “We had a system in this country that rewarded brokers, that made people rich for enrolling fake people in programs that are meant to ensure that our fellow citizens have health care,” Vance said. “This was a scandal.”
Again, the White House has given us very little to verify that this was actual fraud. We are supposed to trust that this administration is earnestly looking for fraud in public programs even as it seeks to undermine the programs themselves.
But the biggest reason to be skeptical of the administration’s narrative is the fact that it comes as the White House itself, starting from the very top, actively works to defraud the American people.
It does not receive as much attention as Trump’s assault on American cities or his draconian program of deportations and removals, but the president and his administration have been waging an all-out war on Congress’s once-sacrosanct power of the purse.
In an effort spearheaded by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the White House has unilaterally canceled billions of dollars of spending approved by Congress. It has withheld funds for both Head Start and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; for grants issued by the National Institutes of Health and for funds allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act. According to the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency within the legislative branch, the administration is engaged in serial violations of the Impoundment Control Act, a Watergate-era law meant to block presidential attempts to rewrite or otherwise ignore congressional appropriations.
In an April hearing before the Senate Budget Committee, Vought denied accusations from Democrats that the White House had broken the law. “We have not impounded anything,” Vought said. But what he has done is try to run out the fiscal clock on spending funds through the end of the government’s fiscal year, which closes Sept. 30. To do this, he is using a presidential request to Congress to not spend the appropriation, called a rescission, as a means of delay.
When the president requests a rescission, the money is put on hold for 45 days. If it’s done just before the end of the fiscal year, the White House can effectively cancel the appropriation, since the funds will have expired by the time Congress votes on the rescission request. This is known as a “pocket rescission,” and it is a way to game the process so that the president can pick and choose what he wants to spend.
Trump’s attempt last week to slash roughly $800 million in spending on refugee resettlement, grants to migrant students and funds for minority businesses was a pocket rescission — an attempt to get around Congress’s spending authority.
It is difficult to overstate the way this subverts the basic structure of the American system. The power of the purse is paramount — it gives Congress ultimate authority over the entire operation of government. A president who wields this power is a president who can effectively cancel any law or nullify any agency he dislikes by refusing to spend the money appropriated for it.
The framers placed the power of the purse in the legislature, and specifically in the House of Representatives, because they believed it was important to tie it as closely as possible to the direct interests of the people. In so doing, they were informed by the experience of 17th-century England and Parliament’s clash with monarchical power during and after the English Civil War. To place the power to spend — and tax — in the hands of the people, however defined, was to safeguard liberty from the grasping hands of a tyrannical king or corrupt executive.
Trump’s attempt to seize spending power from Congress is not just about his preferred policies; it is also about his effort to etch himself into the nation’s built landscape with new structures and monuments. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in taxpayer funds are flowing to the president’s ballroom and triumphal arch, among other supposed beautification projects. This is true despite the fact that Congress has yet to make a specific appropriation for Trump’s gaudy revamp of the nation’s capital.
But much of the trouble involves the president treating the public treasury as his own to use as he sees fit. Trump rejects any distinction between himself and the office he holds. The presidency belongs to him, as does the nation itself. (This helps explain why he felt he could remove journalists from the White House. In his mind, they are in his house, accountable only to him.)
And if it all belongs to him, then who is to say that he can’t decide what he wants to spend? Who has the right to tell him anything at all?
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