It's not that simple. Congress can't specify every pen and pencil expense, so they allocate large buckets. The executive can decide how each bucket is spent. Like when your mom gives you $20 to go to the movies. She doesn't care what movie you see, but she'd be mad if you skipped the movies and spent it on weed.
And what they are doing now is "skipping the movies and spending it on weed." Shutting down USAID, even if eventually Rubio came in and rolled that back is what you just described. That was an office created by congress.
If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright. If not, they need to distribute the funds during the fiscal year.
I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues. Payments pause when this happens. Moreover, everybody has known for decades that nobody is reading these 50,000 page appropriations bills.
I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
The president has asked them to do this. If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus. If he pardons them for obvious malfeasance it will make big political waves and likely change the outcome of the midterm elections, where a congress could begin impeachment.
>If they find serious issues they can likely go to congress and have them canceled outright
uhh, no they can't. Those are also government elected representatives. Checks and balances. To "cancel congress", you need the courts to charge and convict them. You're going to find it very hard to do that from treasury records alone (AKA, how the executive branch spends the money allocated).
>I don’t understand the pearl clutching. The government shuts down often due to spending issues.
With that dismissal, you're not opening yourself up to understanding. Maybe there's wrongdoing; The answer isn't to charge into the treasury and hack it.
That's the stupid part: Musk doesn't need to. He's clearly not TSI/TS clearance level, so he just needs trump to go in and look. Or have trump hire someone with that clearance to look in on his orders. Remember, this is the executive branch; Trump has all access powers here (within reason).
>I’m willing to give musk and his guys some time to sort this out.
I'm not. I didn't vote for him. You didn't. He was not approved by Senate, as is executive apointee tradition. He does not have clearance. "Asking" isn't enough. Where's this willingness coming from? Even if you just like the guy, you really want the man who laid off 80% of his staff to handle your money?
>If they go against his wishes there is no reason they will not be thrown under the bus
You are just wrong here. You misread my comment. The “them” in my 3rd paragraph refers to the paused payments. If it turns out that what congress appropriated funds for is actually fraud, congress will want to know, and can amend that spending retroactive to this fiscal year. How is this controversial to you?
Elon Musk was hand picked by the president to do this job. Clearly you do not like the president nor Elon but that is a personal view not held by a majority of voters in the last election.
A better analogy might be that mom bought groceries for the starving family down the road with a check and you cancelled the check, stole the checkbook, and changed the bank account password.
But clearly: did not spend it. Did not misappropriate it. That is much different.
To me it’s more like mom gave me money to pay the rent but my landlord is likely violating laws so in the meantime I am putting the rent in escrow while we sort out the facts.
But that wasn’t your decision to make. Maybe your picture of the landlord is incomplete, and you act as the hot-headed, short-sighted teenager your are, instead of sitting down with mom to discuss the situation.
Disagree. You are allowed to have agency. Mom would be proud of you for not wasting her money. If there is no crime, the landlord will be made whole. Maybe with a little interest at the prevailing rate.
And that's where the analogy falls apart, because yes, maybe it's okay for a teenager to have an agency, but billionaire friends of the president are not, in fact, allowed to have an agency on government spending! People who waltz in and have no fucking clue of how things work generally are not allowed to have an agency!
Remember when Musk built the submarine to save the kids in the cave, was absolutely useless, even actively obstructed others from saving them, and finally resorted to denigrate the diver saving them as a pedophile? That's exactly the same thing he is doing right now.
He’s not a “billionaire friend” in this role. He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it. You expect the president to do everything by himself? Trump likes businessmen. Steve Mnuchin was another “billionaire friend” and it’s hard find fault in his tenure running treasury.
> He was asked by the president to do a job and he’s doing it.
1. And he did it in an illegal way, yes. If you wanna go back to Mom, you can go to the grocery but you cannot throw a bank heist and lock all employees out of the store so you can grab some bread
2. He doesn't have access to the store. Mom sent him to Costo without her card. You can't just storm into Costco. Go back to mom and get her card, if possible.
Is it illegal? My understanding is that paused appropriations are tied to the fiscal year. That’s September 30th. Are you sure they are not? Or are you just being an ideologue?
Nobody stormed anything. They just filed a dispute with their credit card company. Costco will get the funds if they win the dispute. If there is malfeasance at Costco don’t you want to know? What exactly are you afraid of?
Meanwhile the laywer refuses because the constitution says that you cannot "save up money" that "your mom" allocated. Let alone choose to spend it on a lawyer instead of groceries. You need to argue with Mom about lawyer Money next quarter.
Congress mandated the creation of USAID in 1961. I don't hthink the executive branch has the legal authority to just abolish it by fiat or change its status from independent to a subordinate organ of the state department.
We are a nation of laws still. At least three judges have told Trump/Musk to stop what they are doing. The problem we are running into right now is who enforces the laws when the Executive branch decides they don't want to follow them?
How would you change the tone? I feel like that was a plain and matter-of-fact sentence. I get the term "misinformation" is feels loaded but it wasn't unfair to say.
edit and the fact that the poster did have the good sense to add an edit was part of the reason I decided to say something because telling someone who didn't would just be a waste of time
"Confirming your beliefs prior to posting would be useful here."
That edits the swipe of "spreading misinformation", which whilst accurate is charged and puts the reader on the defensive, as well as the more egregious "you know what you are talking about" which is nakedly aggressive. HN discussion is highly sensitive to nuances of tone, a point dang makes frequently:
(That last isn't too significant for a well-down-thread comment such as yours, but still plays a strong role, especially in politically-tinged discussion, and especially in the present environment.)
(I make a point of confirming information I provide in comments, largely through inline links or footnotes. Of which I am ... inordinately ... fond: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>. I've more than once changed my comment significantly on discovering my initial beliefs were false.)
Agree that there are ways to say it nicer, but I still contend that what I said was not aggressive. The poster started with "Correct!" and they didn't understand the thing they said was "correct." I think it's fair to point out that they inappropriately made statements about something they didn't know. They even admitted to learning it afterwards. Its fair criticism and if folks wanna be making claims online they should be able to handle it.
If you read dang's admonitions (as I have, for many years) you'll find that his viewpoint and official HN policy is that tone matters immensely, and is often read as diminished / positive by authors and amplified / negatively by recipients.
Searching for "personal attacks" and "swipes" will turn up many such examples:
I hear you. But like I said, I didn't make a personal attack or swipe. I pointed out that the person shouldn't confidently make claims for things they don't know lest they spread misinformation. It was a fair comment.
(I'm not dang, I'm not a mod, just something of a student of how HN (dys)functions over the years. Which is generally far above the online norm, not that the bar isn't low.)
> Correct, the executive branch can always opt to not spend the money it was allocated.
No, they cannot. Trump was impeached during his first term over this very issue. Congress had appropriated funding for the Ukraine, Trump didn't want to provide it without obtaining concessions from Zelenski. Just like Trump doesn't want to provide California any FEMA money for the LA fires without concessions. Trump has been through this before, he knows it's illegal, but he doesn't care. It's kinda funny that people expect a felon to care about the law.
Well, Biden tried to not spend money to build a wall on the border. And he essentially ran out the clock in that one, so I guess there has been recent success.
The false equivalence is so tiring. It’s okay to admit things are unprecedented.
When asked about the news on Oct. 5 that new border wall construction would indeed commence under his administration, Biden told reporters: “The border wall — the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get to them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
Trump intended to build the wall with no environmental assessments or permits and congress wrote in a waiver since the border was “an emergency” but Biden chose to rescind the emergency declaration and follow the long-established federal construction process instead of using the waivers which does indeed slow things down.
That’s nothing like what is happening with Musk “deleting” entire departments or unilaterally stopping funding because he doesn’t like the phrasing of the grants.
I wasn’t trying to claim any equivalence. I was replying to “It's just that as far as I can recall no one has ever really tried to spend less in the government.” Biden did, in fact, try to spend less than was appropriated.
I'll just be in good faith and believe you wholesale. Yes, that is one way to fight the spending. Make the government argue until a deadline is hit and then they either shut down or compromise. Happens much too often.
But that's the point: the budget wasn't made yet. Trump wants to argue over funding that was already in place. If he wanted this chaos legally, he'd have been stalling out the March funding next quarter. But once it's finalized, it's finalized and many challenges over the centuries were shot down.
I get how the system works but I also don't understand how congress can force the executive branch to take out a loan but also sets a debt ceiling which could shut down the government unless it's raised by congress. So congress blames the president for taking out debt, which they force, and refuse to raise taxes to reduce the deficit. Something in that loop is broken. I don't think the president should have unilateral power but I also don't think congress should be able to set both the spending and the debt limit.
I agree. I just think we need to focus more on congress' role in this. The checks and balances only work if we force congress to act as a check and as long as congress keeps voting along party lines and doing the president's bidding, not much is going to change. It shouldn't be normal for the senate to confirm radically unqualified people to positions of power just because the president nominates them.
we can focus on the future when the present isn't tearing down before us.
Sad thing is no one is really talking about this in any branch, so it's just theory crafting until then.
if you want to change that you need a huge voter base that is anti-partisan. Given that we can barely mobilize within parties to protest properly: good luck.
That disconnect is why some people argue the debt limit is unconstitutional - Congress authorized the spending and if they didn’t authorize enough revenue the executive is still obligated to spend regardless.
To do otherwise the executive has to pick and choose what to fund.
The topic usually gets raised every time we get close to a debt limit. If we truly broached the limit it’s possible the Biden and Obama administrations would have just ignored the limit since the consequences of the full faith and credit of the US failing are so dire and there’s a solid argument it’s the least bad option Constitutionally.
Its in the first article of the constitution.