Since January 2025, the executive branch has blocked federal agencies from spending, by one estimate, at least $410 billion in federal funds approved by Congress in areas including foreign aid, scientific research, news programming at Voice of America, and education. It has dismantled large components of some federal agencies. It has, according to Congress’s internal watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), broken the law in withholding certain funds for Head Start, programs supporting museums and libraries, FEMA, and electric vehicle infrastructure. 

Errant behavior by the executive branch represents an existential threat to Congress in multiple ways. First, allowing the executive branch broad discretion over federal spending runs directly counter to the Constitution’s command that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law;” it also contradicts both laws that provide for a specific process which the president is to follow if he wants to cancel congressionally-approved spending and that bar agencies from spending more money than Congress has allocated to them.

Ignoring Congress’s past decisions also makes it more difficult for legislators to reach new agreements in the future. If members of Congress can’t trust that the executive branch will implement the decisions they work hard to negotiate, what is the incentive to do the hard work of deal-making? What’s more, the executive branch’s renewed interest in special legislative procedures that allow certain measures cancelling spending to move through Congress on a simple majority basis sets up an imbalance: it takes 60 votes to defeat a filibuster and approve a spending bill in the Senate in the first place, but only 51 votes to undo that deal in the future. (The executive branch is also pursuing what GAO has determined is an illegal option for cancelling spending without congressional approval that stands to tip the scales even more away from the legislative branch.)

The threat to Congress comes not only from the executive branch directly. While, for a range of historical and institutional reasons, adjudicating spending questions is not entirely comfortable terrain for judges, the federal courts have become the primary venue in which the battle over the executive’s conduct is being fought. The decisions so far have been a mixed bag for Congress and, because they’ve mostly come from district and circuit courts, many are still winding their way through the legal process. But even if the judiciary ends up rendering decisions in favor of congressional choices—an outcome, to be clear, that’s far from certain—relying on the courts to backstop congressional power can be a dangerous business. The harm that can be done while litigation unfolds can be real, and the time to resolution can be long.

There are steps Congress can take to address this worsening imbalance of power between the branches. Moving language, for example, that has historically appeared in documents accompanying spending bills into the text of legislation might help bolster pro-Congress arguments in future litigation.

But the behavior on the part of the executive branch that is intruding on Congress’s prerogatives highlights why small steps—while helpful—aren’t sufficient to rebalance power. Take the desire by the executive branch to exploit a lack of clarity in the law that lays out what the president is to do if he wishes to seek the cancellation of spending already approved by Congress. By seeking to cancel funds close to the date when they are set to expire, the executive branch believes it can prevent them from being spent without Congress having to approve the decision. The GAO has already declared this practice illegal. That hasn’t stopped the executive branch from exploring the option anyway.

Writing new laws that seek to prevent the executive branch from overreach—while a helpful start—only goes so far when the underlying problem is that the very same executive branch is disregarding the laws Congress has already written. Any meaningful, long-term solution that restores congressional power will require members of Congress to decide for themselves to withhold support for something the executive branch cares about. In a period of unified party control and strong partisan loyalty, it is somewhat difficult to imagine the congressional majority stepping up to the plate.