After President Donald Trump’s attack on USAID, Congress has to stand up for itself | Opinion
This week, Donald Trump lawlessly shut down the United States Agency for International Development. While the agency was created through a presidential executive order during the Cold War, its existence was cemented in law by Congress in 1998 — nearly three decades ago.
Trump’s men literally shut down USAID’s offices and website, furloughed its employees, fired its contractors and shut off disbursement of money to projects around the world despite the fact that Congress funded them in laws signed by President Joe Biden.
Today, many are stunned that a president would so blithely ignore the constitutional separation of powers that gives Congress the ultimate power of the purse. I am not.
While Trump is bigger and badder than what came before, his lawlessness is just a continuation of the lawless acts of the last three presidents — Barack Obama, Trump and Biden alike.
Each presidency recklessly shredded the power of Congress to create and shut down programs and to determine how federal money is spent.
Obama overstepped on DACA
Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program after he clearly said that only Congress could do so and for him to act would be unconstitutional. When Congress decided not to create the program Obama wanted, he created it anyway. He legalized hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants giving them permission to work and stay in the United States indefinitely and spent millions on administration of the program that Congress never gave him.
Oh, the law professor president provided a patina of justification for the move, but finally after years of lower court rulings against it and a Supreme Court decision on a side issue, the 5th Circuit Court’s decision upholding a lower court ruling that DACA is unconstitutional appears to be headed to the Supreme Court.
Trump began to build a wall
Trump in his first term faced a Congress reluctant to fund his signature issue: building the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. When lawmakers said no, Trump just took billions of dollars from Defense Department funds and started building anyway.
While the Supreme Court gave Trump a procedural ruling that kept both the wall-building and the lawsuit against it alive, the dispute has yet to be decided on the merits.
Biden forgave student debt
For the third presidency in a row, Biden faced a Congress that didn’t want to fund one of his signature initiatives: forgiving hundreds of billions in student debt. When Congress was not forthcoming, Biden decided to forgive the loans on his own, stretching emergency provisions in the underlying laws past their breaking point. Eventually the Supreme Court struck his $400 billion effort down, but Biden just turned around and started forgiving smaller amounts by stretching different provisions of law beyond what Congress intended.
In the end, Biden was able to spend more than $200 billion on loan forgiveness without congressional authority, spawning multiple lawsuits, none of which caught up with him before he left office.
In each case, the president took the power to create or shut down programs and fund them or not away from Congress and gave it to himself. In each case, it was unconstitutional. In each case it was lawless. And in each case, Congressmen and senators of the president’s own party looked the other way as their branch of government was shorn of its power.
Now with USAID, Trump has taken these power grabs to a new extreme. And like with each case that came before, the president’s partisans in Congress ignore what the president is doing and the court process is too slow to catch up before the damage is done.
Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley when asked about Trump’s move, mumbled, “It’s how you define the quote-unquote executive power of the president of the United States, and I can’t define that for you.” You can bet that Grassley could define the limits of executive power when Obama and Biden were in office.
And this week, a gaggle of Democrats set up a press conference outside USAID’s office to decry what the president had done there. Rep. Ilhan Omar said at the event, “This is what dictatorship looks like,” but when Obama and Biden were acting like dictators, she didn’t object.
If Congress and the Supreme Court don’t stand up for themselves and start acting with principle instead of partisanship, Trump’s lawless acts are just getting started.
