Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the chairwoman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, has accused President Donald Trump of illegally refusing to spend $2.9 billion in funds approved by Congress.
She and her Democratic counterpart, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), wrote a letter to the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, saying the Trump administration violated the six-month spending bill that was approved by Congress earlier this month. It is the latest development in the struggle between the White House and Congress over which body has the ultimate power over spending — despite Congress having the constitutional authority to dole out funds.
Collins and Murray cited a memo that Trump sent to Congress earlier this week declaring that only a portion of the $12.4 billion that Congress designated as emergency funding in the law would be spent, as the administration did not agree with some of Congress’s emergency designations for the funding.
“Just as the president does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate,” Collins and Murray said.
They continued that the Trump administration’s view of federal budget law is at odds with how presidents on both sides of the aisle have interpreted it for two decades, including during the first Trump administration.
“It is incumbent on all of us to follow the law as written — not as we would like it to be,” the senators wrote.
According to documents compiled by the Appropriations Committee, the White House’s move to withhold the money would deny funding in 11 specific areas that the Trump administration has already targeted for large-scale reductions or to eliminate entirely. That includes withholding $750 million in international disaster assistance, $750 million in migration and refugee assistance, $234 million for the National Science Foundation, and $100 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Collins additionally noted that the administration withheld $115 million for international narcotics control and enforcement.
“Why would you want to do that, given the huge drug problem that we have had?” she told the New York Times. “We need the help of other nations to stop that.”
Collins’s signature marks one of the clearest examples of Republicans in Congress taking tangible action to counter the Trump administration. In the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) also slammed the administration’s decision to withhold these funds, but her letter was not signed by her Republican counterpart on the panel, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK).
In a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday, Murray said Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill had been ignoring the constitutional provision that gives Congress the power to spend.
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“Right now we have a couple of billionaires running our country straight into the ground who seem to have skipped American history because President Trump and Elon Musk don’t seem to care much about our Constitution,” she said, noting the constitutional provision that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”
“Their lack of interest in that section of the Constitution doesn’t make it any less real at all,” she said.