What we witnessed on Jan. 25, when Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget directed all agents and agencies of the federal government to cease disbursing federal funds, was a coup d’etat. To be sure, it was rescinded only two days later in the face of a tidal wave of opposition from the public, but we should make no mistake about the aim and purpose of this measure: to seize federal authority and concentrate it permanently in the hands of President Trump and whoever succeeds him.
According to Trump, the aim of this draconian executive order was to pause, review and then curtail federal expenditure, a goal Republicans have pursued for decades and which is the central mission of Elon Musk’s new-fangled Department of Government Efficiency. Whatever we think about government “waste” and the profligate use of taxpayer dollars to send space missions to Mars, it’s critical to see beyond the issue of dollars and cents, and to grasp the dangerous philosophy of government that underpins the administration’s recent actions.
Congress is a democratically elected body and under the Constitution it decides the most important question that any democratic society considers: how to raise and spend its collective wealth. Congress controls the “purse-strings” of government, and it alone decides who and what to tax, how much to tax, and how and where to spend the revenue raised by taxation. The president is responsible for executing legislation passed by Congress (elected members of the House and Senate) and for much of our day-to-day foreign policy. But when the president moves to stop the expenditure authorized by Congress, he exceeds his constitutional authority. Indeed, he runs rough-shod over the democratically constituted power of the Congress and the American people.
This concentration of financial and political power in a single man is exactly what American revolutionaries protested in the 1760s and 1770s when they condemned the corruption of the British Parliament and the Crown, and it is exactly what most concerned the founders at Philadelphia in 1787 when they wrote the Federal Constitution.
This isn’t a complicated principle but it’s a vital one. If Congress has no power to appropriate and spend money, it has no power to legislate, and becomes simply a rather large and unwieldy council to the King. And if the president is the only one who can decide whether or not money appropriated by Congress will be spent, then he assumes the power of legislation as well as the power of the executive. Indeed, Trump has suggested that the effort to prevent him halting federal spending is unconstitutional, and in doing so has assumed the powers of all three branches of government: deciding what legislation will be enacted, how it will be funded and whether or not it is constitutional. These are the powers of a king or a dictator.
For a brief moment, on Jan. 25, our democracy ceased to exist. And then it was, thankfully, restored. But it isn’t secure. Trump and his motley crew of billionaires, bankers and TV hosts were testing our limits, probing to see how far they could go. They will try again, armed with an idea that is the absolute antithesis of the most important principle of American democracy or even of American republicanism: that one man should wield total power, that one man can act as a political sovereign.
We need to be clear about what happened recently in Washington. And we need to realize, quickly, that authoritarian government doesn’t always arrive with military fanfare and tanks in the street. It can also arrive quietly and bureaucratically, seeping into the spaces we leave it to expand, and gradually consolidating its power. Indeed, this is exactly how the founders imagined dictatorship would arrive, not at the point of a sword but as a slow process of degeneration and corruption. A result of what happens when good people start to believe the lies their leaders tell them and the fables they peddle in their relentless pursuit of power.
Marcus Daniel is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who specializes in the American Revolution and the founding period.
