“The purse is in the hands of the representatives of the people,” James Madison said at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788, responding to Patrick Henry’s fears of military despotism. “They have the appropriation of all moneys.”
Alexander Hamilton made a similar point while speaking at the New York ratifying convention:
We have heard a great deal of the sword and the purse. Let us see what is the true meaning of this maxim, which has been so much used, and so little understood. It is, that you shall not place these powers either in the legislative or executive, singly; neither one nor the other shall have both, because this would destroy that division of powers on which political liberty is founded, and would furnish one body with all the means of tyranny. But where the purse is lodged in one branch, and the sword in another, there can be no danger.
The aim of the 1787 Constitution was to secure the future of republican government in the United States. And republican political theory of the time insisted, as Madison wrote, on the “separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent, is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty.”
The president may have wide authority to act across a broad assortment of different areas, but he cannot spend any more or less than what Congress mandates without explicit approval from the Legislature. “This power over the purse,” wrote Madison in Federalist No. 58, “may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
To upset this balance of power — to give the president, in effect, the power of the purse — is to unravel the constitutional system in its entirety. A Congress that cannot force the executive to abide by its spending decisions is a Congress whose power of the purse is a nullity and whose spending laws are little more than a batch of recommendations.
In its memo announcing Trump’s freeze, the Office of Management and Budget declared that “Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities.” Not so fast. The first duty of everyone who serves in the United States government is to the Constitution, which means that career and political appointees have a duty to act according to the law. There is no mechanism by which “the will of the American people” overrides the policies of a previous Congress, signed duly into law by a previous occupant of the White House.
