Susan Collins was a Senate intern in 1974 when Congress, in response to President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to spend on tasks he opposed, handed a sweeping price range regulation to bar presidents from overriding lawmakers when it got here to doling out {dollars}.
The ensuing regulation, the Congressional Finances and Impoundment Management Act, is “very clear, and it re-emphasizes the power of the purse that Congress has under the Constitution,” Ms. Collins, now a 72-year-old Republican senator from Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, mentioned in an interview this week.
She and her fellow appropriators in each events could have a battle on their palms in the event that they hope to retain supremacy in federal spending. The query of who has the ultimate phrase is rising as a central level of competition between members of Congress and the White Home, a conflict that’s prone to escalate after the affirmation on Thursday of Russell T. Vought because the director of President Trump’s Workplace of Administration and Finances.
Mr. Vought has flatly declared that he and Mr. Trump think about the price range act to be unconstitutional. They contend that the White Home can select what will get cash and what doesn’t even when it conflicts with particular instructions from Congress by appropriations measures signed into regulation. Others on Capitol Hill, together with some Republicans, vehemently dispute that concept.
The disagreement is spurring the uproar over Mr. Trump’s transfer to droop trillions of {dollars} in federal spending whereas the chief department critiques it to find out whether or not it complies together with his newly issued coverage dictates, in addition to the president’s efforts to intestine the US Company for Worldwide Growth.
