On the menu today: We have another bout of presidential lawbreaking — calm down, Alvin Bragg, this isn’t in your jurisdiction. President Trump continues to ignore the ban on TikTok, and is implausibly claiming that a buyer for the remarkably popular Chinese propaganda app is just around the corner. Elsewhere, the administration announces, with little explanation, that it’s just not going to spend nearly $8 billion in appropriated Department of Education funds, including money that’s supposed to help immigrant children learn English. You know, that doesn’t quite align with the executive order declaring English the official language of the United States. And the U.S. General Accounting Office finds two other cases where the administration just ignored Congress and didn’t spend money that the law required it to spend. The fight over the Impoundment Control Act is all going to end up at the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, maybe Republicans in Congress and this president should more closely examine the spending bills they pass and sign into law.
Ignoring the Law, Presidential Style
There are a bunch of times when the shrieking about an imperial presidency is overwrought, but in a couple of cases since taking office, President Trump has simply ignored the law. This never works out well for him, and he’s supposed to have a White House counsel’s office making sure that the administration follows the law.
Large bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate passed a law requiring that TikTok be sold or banned. President Biden signed it into law, and the Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional. TikTok was scheduled to be banned in the U.S. on January 19, 2025, unless its parent company, ByteDance, divested its U.S. operations. This deadline was set by that law passed in 2024. TikTok is still owned by ByteDance. As our Jimmy Quinn laid out in detail more than two years ago, “ByteDance is a key player in the Chinese Communist Party’s military-industrial-surveillance system. . . . ByteDance is subject to all the influence, guidance and de facto control to which the Chinese Communist Party now subjects all PRC technology companies.”
This is not a close call, this is not a grey area, this is not debatable, and there is no wiggle room. Under the law, TikTok is supposed to be banned right now.
TikTok is not banned because Trump just doesn’t feel like banning it, and three times he has claimed a nonexistent presidential privilege to delay the implementation of the law. He also keeps claiming that TikTok has a potential buyer and that a deal is imminent. A couple of days ago, Trump claimed he would reveal the new buyer “in about two weeks.” (Just about everything with this president is going to happen in about two weeks.)
So for the past six months, TikTok has continued to feed anti-American crap like “Osama bin Laden made a lot of reasonable points” and “Hamas was justified” into the minds of America’s teenagers and young people. The Russian, Chinese, North Korean, or Iranian governments would never allow us to send a social-media app that promoted pro-American propaganda onto the screens of their teenagers. Why are we allowing the Chinese Communist Party, through a company it effectively controls, do this to our young people? Why does our president — Mr. “America First!” — keep telling us how tough he is with China, and then keep doing what Xi Jinping wants him to do, in defiance of federal law?
Our Caroline Downey reminds us that TikTok fueled the rise of Zohran Mamdani. Parents, don’t let your kids use TikTok, or they could end up ranting about “seizing the means of production,” and before you know it, your child could end up hanging around the wrong crowd, like New York City Democratic primary voters.
Earlier this year, I noted that at the same time the president was declaring English the official language of the United States, the Trump administration gutted U.S. Department of Education programs designed to help immigrant children learn English.
Conservatives have a lot of beefs with a lot of varieties of federal education spending, and the Department of Education as a whole. But you’d have to look far and wide to find conservatives who don’t want every American child to speak English, and we know there are American homes where English is not spoken inside the home. More than one-fifth of the U.S. population speaks a language other than English at home; among these individuals, 61 percent speak Spanish, 5 percent speak a dialect of Chinese, and 2.5 percent speak Tagalog, which is primarily spoken in the Philippines.
Considering this, it makes sense for the federal government to “help ensure that English learners and immigrant students attain English proficiency and achieve academic success.” This is exactly what the Education Department’s Office of English Language Acquisition does, and this is what federal Title III funds are supposed to do.
Even if you don’t like the idea of this program, once Congress passes appropriations to the various federal departments, those federal departments or the president can’t just decide to not spend that money. Yes, there is a process called impoundment under the Impoundment Control Act, but the president has to follow procedure, as the U.S. General Accounting Office lays out:
Impoundment is only legal when the President adheres to the procedures and limitations in the ICA. . . . In general, when Congress approves funds, federal agencies are required to spend it. The President cannot legally withhold funds unless he follows ICA procedures. For example, the President may not simply refuse to spend funds because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices without sending a special message.
The GAO is the legislative branch’s auditor of federal spending.
The Trump administration is holding back nearly $6.8 billion in federal funding for K-12 schools it was scheduled to dole out July 1, Education Department staff told state education agencies on Monday afternoon — the day before the funding, by law, was required to start flowing. . . .
Each year on July 1, by law, states receive the bulk of the federal education money Congress allocated for the upcoming K-12 school year. This year’s allocations were supposed to roughly mirror last year’s, after Congress passed a continuing resolution in March that extended the previous year’s funding levels government-wide.
But in an unsigned email message sent after 2 p.m. Monday reviewed by Education Week, the Education Department informed states that the agency won’t be sending states any money tomorrow from the following programs:
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Title I-C for migrant education ($375 million)
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Title II-A for professional development ($2.2 billion)
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Title III-A for English-learner services ($890 million)
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Title IV-A for academic enrichment ($1.3 billion)
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Title IV-B for before- and after-school programs ($1.4 billion)
Again, this is not spending that is being debated for next year. This is spending that has already been allocated — the U.S. House of Representatives passed the continuing resolution on March 11, the Senate passed it March 14, and President Trump signed it into law on March 15. Once you sign it into law, you can’t change your mind; there are no takebacks. If any Republicans didn’t want to spend this money, they shouldn’t have voted for the continuing resolution or, in Trump’s case, signed it into law.
But apparently the Trump administration wants to assert that it can simply ignore passed laws and choose what money it wants to spend and where:
Deadlines in the coming weeks will clarify how much the administration wants to test the law, enacted in 1974 after President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal. White House officials are planning to “defer” roughly 200 separate accounts across the federal government, according to two people familiar with the matter, who, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. These delays, which would affect billions of dollars at a wide range of U.S. agencies, probably would be illegal if they prevent the funds from being spent before this fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, the people said.
So far, the General Accounting Office has found two cases where the administration’s refusal to spend money appropriated by Congress violated the law. In May, the GAO determined that the Department of Transportation’s refusal to spend money for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and concluded the department was “not authorized under the ICA to withhold these funds from expenditure and must continue to carry out the statutory requirements of the program.”
Then in June, the GAO determined that the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, “ceased performing agency functions and withheld from obligation and expenditure funds that Congress appropriated for such functions.”
This will probably end up being fought at the Supreme Court, with the Trump administration arguing that the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutionally violates the president’s authority to set spending priorities for the executive branch, or infringes upon his ability to eliminate wasteful spending. That is likely to be a difficult argument to make, in light of the Constitution’s declaration, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time” — what is often characterized as Congress having “the power of the purse.”
A lot of conservatives are going to want to argue about the merits of each program, but in the end, it doesn’t matter whether you love a particular federal program or whether you hate it; the question is whether a president and the executive branch can choose to ignore an appropriations law passed by Congress and signed into law.
If Republicans in Congress and the president don’t want to spend money on a program, don’t put money for the program in the appropriations bill and don’t sign it into law in the first place.
ADDENDUM: A reader objected to yesterday’s newsletter, arguing that my opposition to quadrupling the state and local tax deduction — which mostly helps middle-to-upper income households in states like New York, California, New Jersey, and Illinois — makes me a “Beltway babbler” and that I shouldn’t bemoan a “‘tax cut’ that’s largely just a continuation of the 2017 tax reform.”
Except the Big Beautiful Bill isn’t “largely just a continuation of the 2017 tax reform.” The BBB not only quadruples the state and local tax deduction, it eliminates the tax on tips, eliminates the tax on overtime income (capped at $12,500 in the Senate version), increases the estate and lifetime gift tax exemption amount to $15 million for single filers, and $30 million for married filing jointly, creates a $6,000 addition to the standard deduction for Americans 65 and older, creates a new $10,000 deduction for interest payments on car loans, and gives an automatic $1,000 deposit in a new tax-advantaged “Trump account.”
If you want to quibble about the details of the projections from the Congressional Budget Office or the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, fine. But as our John Puri details, the more the Senate worked on the BBB, the more complicated and debt-unfriendly it became. The costs are front-loaded, the claimed savings are backloaded from delayed starts and phase-ins.
If the bill just extended the 2017 tax cuts, it would have been much easier to pass and would not exacerbate the annual deficits and cumulative debt over the next ten years nearly as badly as it does. What makes it indisputably big and (debatably) beautiful is all the new stuff in there.