Shutdown Or Not, Trump Admin Is Prepping New Ways To Ignore Separation Of Powers

House and Senate Democrats on their chambers’ appropriations committees have been saying for weeks that they want to negotiate bipartisan spending bills to keep the government open for the remainder of the fiscal year. The only thing they’ve requested in return — for their cooperation in helping to pass a short-term spending bill to keep the government open and/or as part of the typical top-line spending amount negotiations — is some sort of guarantee that constitutionally protected separation of powers will be restored. They want Republicans to commit to a return to the world in which Congress, and not the White House or a random billionaire, makes spending decisions.

It is “extremely difficult to reach an agreement” on how to keep the government open “when the President is illegally blocking vast chunks of approved funding, when he is trying to unilaterally shutter critical agencies, and when an unelected billionaire is empowered to force his way into our government’s central, highly-sensitive payments system,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said early last month.

“Democrats and Republicans alike must be able to trust that when a deal gets signed into law, it will be followed,” she said.

So Democrats have insisted for weeks that, in order to get their help on any type of short-term spending bill to keep the government open, they’d need some assurance that Trump and Elon Musk will stop lawlessly shutting down agencies and ending funding for federal programs.

Republicans called the request a non-starter. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) even described it as “a violation of separation of powers.”

Trump was able to bully enough Republican holdouts to get in line and support the continuing resolution (the funding bill) that it passed the House earlier this week without Democratic support. But he was reportedly, in part, able to do that by assuring those Republicans, who have built their brand on never approving government spending, that his administration would pursue impoundment to not actually spend the money that Congress will have appropriated.

The extent to which that latest almost certainly illegal assertion was a negotiating tactic to bully members of Congress into line remained unclear. But Fox News is reporting today that it spoke with sources who claim the threat is real. Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought are reportedly gaming out how exactly they’ll impound the funds from the Republican CR if it passes the Senate.

From Fox News Digital’s report this afternoon:

Two people familiar with the conversations told Fox News Digital that President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought are working on a strategy for impounding federal funds that Congress is expected to allocate this week, before the partial government shutdown deadline on March 14.

Senate Democrats were already loathe to help Republicans pass the CR — either by invoking cloture on the legislation so that Senate Republicans can pass the MAGA bill with a simple majority (in exchange for Republican leadership giving Dems a vote on their 30-day spending bill) or by giving them the votes they need to overcome the filibuster.

But the impoundment news only exacerbates the real problem that Democrats have been trying to keep front and center for weeks: the Trump administration is already not following the law. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) expressed that exact sentiment to my colleague Kate Riga this afternoon, after the Fox News story broke.

From our liveblog coverage:

“Republicans in the House of Representatives and Republicans in the Senate are complicit in allowing President Trump to violate the law,” he told me. “They’re letting it happen and it’s already happening today.”