Staff

William Ford

Policy Advocate

William Ford is a policy advocate at Protect Democracy, where he supports the organization’s work to strengthen legislative guardrails against abuses of executive power. He focuses in particular on reforms to strengthen Congress’s power of the purse and oversight authorities. Ford founded OpenOMB.org, a website that makes it easier to track the Office of Management and Budget’s apportionments of appropriations. And he led the research for and co-authored The Myth of Presidential Impoundment Power, a recent paper on the history of presidential impoundments.

Work Themes

Featured Work

An image of Donald Trump's signature on a bill.

The impoundment threat, explained

Trump’s position is wrong. There is no inherent power to impound.  The history of presidential impoundments make this clear. 

October 28, 2022

  • Defending the Rule of Law
  • Analysis

Featured in the Press

If you Can Keep It Logo

The Biden Administration moves to protect civil servants from future purges (opens a new window)

  • April 4, 2024
  • If You Can Keep It

Thirteen days before he lost the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump tried to remake the federal government.

On Oct. 21, he issued an executive order creating a new category of federal employment, known as Schedule F, in which his administration claimed public servants could be hired and fired at will. An estimated 50,000 career federal employees — the people who ensure the safety of the drugs we take and the food we eat — would have been swept into this category and, had the order survived legal review, purportedly stripped of their employment protections.