The Government Accountability Office — Congress’s auditing and accounting agency — defines “impoundment” as any executive action (whether taken by the president or a subordinate official) that prevents money Congress has appropriated from being spent, either temporarily or permanently. Because federal spending is complex, an impoundment can take a number of forms. In his first administration, President Trump held up funds Congress had appropriated for military assistance to Ukraine, leading to his first impeachment. He accomplished this by having the Office of Management and Budget withhold the funds from the Department of Defense, the agency for which Congress had appropriated the money. A series of executive orders issued in January 2025 also directs agencies to “pause” numerous federal grant programs. Though the administration has styled these actions as temporary, they are still impoundments.  

Under the Constitution, Congress holds the power of the purse. In fact, appropriating federal funds is one of Congress’s enumerated powers. The president’s role in federal spending is simply to see that Congress’s spending laws are faithfully executed. If Congress passes a law requiring that certain money be spent, and the president withholds that money, then he has broken the law. Some members of the Trump administration claim that Congress cannot force the president to spend money because the president has an inherent constitutional power of impoundment. This claim is flat out wrong. More than 180 years ago, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that the president has constitutional authority to defy Congress’s spending laws. And more recently, when President Nixon tried to invoke an inherent constitutional power to defend his strategy of impoundments, he repeatedly lost in federal court. As then Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist wrote before he became a Supreme Court justice, “With respect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds, we must conclude that existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.”

In 1974, in response to Nixon’s impoundments of billions of dollars in funds Congress appropriated for an array of domestic programs, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act. That law reinforced the constitutional requirement that the president spend money Congress has appropriated, unless he gets approval from Congress to do otherwise.  

Hospitals, schools, local governments, and non-profit organizations delivering critical social services all depend on federal funding. Federal money provides clean water and air, safe highways and bridges, and salaries for teachers, doctors, and police officers. And the federal government makes these investments and supports these services because our elected representatives in Congress, after deliberation and consultation from their constituents, enacted these policy choices into law. Unilateral executive impoundment threatens these critical services, harms real people, and undermines our democracy by taking power away from the most representative branch of government and consolidating it in the executive branch. In short, the Trump administration’s sweeping assertion of power to “impound” is an executive power grab with no basis in law or history.