In addition, Republicans say, after more than 30 years as senator, Biden should know better, like sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, put it.
“He’s been in Congress a long time,” Blunt said in an interview. “He knows that it is the job of Congress to authorize how the money is spent and that the president must do it to spend it effectively.”
Even if GAO decides that Biden has stopped funding border walls illegally, he is unlikely to receive any formal punishment, especially not the setback and accusation that Trump went through after the former president stopped Ukraine’s assistance without the Congress’ ruling. The White House also notes that Biden’s hold differs in several important ways from Trump’s attempt to lock up foreign aid, which GAO considered illegal last year.
Biden’s proclamation in January “set this process in motion in a public, transparent manner, while directing agencies to comply with the credit law,” an OMB spokesman said.
The inquiry highlights the challenge that presidents have historically faced in fulfilling campaign promises that require money to be spent – or suspended – contrary to the intent of Congress. During his administration, Trump shifted money from bills to things like military construction projects to pay for the border barrier, as he struggled to get the Congress Democrats to agree on the funding levels needed to build the ‘big, beautiful wall’ that he promised his supporters. Now Biden is having trouble trying to turn off the funding button after saying last year that ‘not another wall of the wall’ would be built during his administration.
“The Biden government needs to be really careful about doing such things, because otherwise they’re just going to do the exact thing the Trump administration did – just across the policy spectrum,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette said. a manager at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
Biden’s defense presents administrative officials with two main arguments.
First, they say that the financing of the boundary wall was necessary to buy the administration time to make a plan to spend the money. An OMB spokesman called it “a necessary and responsible step for the prudent management of federal funds”, given the ongoing lawsuits against Trump’s project.
White House officials add that the disruption of funding was formal and public, with enough time to spend the cash legally and clear instructions that federal agencies must comply with the spending law. In contrast, they note, Trump has secretly sought to raise money such as Ukraine’s aid in 2019 and to tie up government money permanently by acting until the annual spending deadline.
The Senate Republicans who asked GAO to weigh in Biden’s funding movement said ‘billions in legally allocated dollars … are sitting unused by the Biden government’, which amounts to a violation of a 1974 law that the president’s power to limit the funding provided by Congress.
“Many of us agree that the border wall was a very stupid idea – a waste of money – but Congress decided to waste the money on it,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “The way to address it is not for the executive to replace the legislature.”
Aside from the legality, congressional leaders say Trump and Biden’s funding actions illustrate the need for more transparency and teeth in the federal budget law.
Led by progressive Democrat John Yarmuth, the House Budget Committee is “determined to reaffirm and strengthen the power of Congress” and “will review the GAO’s response to the senators’ inquiry,” a committee spokesman said. .
The Kentucky congressman also plans to reintroduce legislation that will increase transparency over executive spending, the assistant said. It is unclear whether the Biden government will support the bill, which requires OMB to disclose its mandates to spend money, and it will cast on the government’s funding decisions in a change that some advocates say is necessary, regardless of who the president is.
Although the government’s accountability office has determined that Trump’s budget office violated the law when it froze US military aid to Ukraine, the former president has not been punished and has been acquitted on charges of abuse of power by foreign powers. to withhold help.
“The faithful implementation of the law does not allow the president to replace his own policy priorities for those who have enacted Congress into law,” GAO wrote early last year.
The Trump administration’s decision to obstruct hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine took place behind closed doors until POLITICO announced the news in August 2019. OMB used a distribution footnote to raise the money, which only some have been released, to stop. weeks before it would expire.
Trump’s OMB conceived of it as a ‘programmatic delay’, an often legitimate reason for spending breaks that severely hampered the government’s accountability office, citing the president’s policies and political ambitions while congressional Democrats accused Trump of he used the money to damage Biden’s image going forward. of the presidential election in 2020.
Trump’s budget office also used the same tactics to set a number of other policy goals, including halting funding for the World Health Organization amid accusations that it thwarted the global response to the coronavirus pandemic and gave China too much respect. .
With a distinction between Trump’s actions and Biden’s move, a current OMB official told POLITICO that the White House’s budget office under the new president has never used that allocation tool to freeze money for building boundary walls. A dual government funding package signed into law late last year included $ 1.4 billion for the wall, in line with what Congress gave Trump through previous spending packages.
Biden’s break – which also characterized his administration as a ‘programmatic delay’ – was publicly announced via presidential proclamation. The government also promised to release the money if the pope violated the intent of Congress.
The Biden administration still plans to spend funds for the boundary wall, and agencies could eventually shell out the dollars for other wall-related purposes permitted by law, such as fencing for fencing.
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.