The power of the purse belongs to Congress, but a growing chorus of legal and political commentators is asking whether that is still true in practice. "If a president can both spend money Congress refused to give him and refuse to spend money Congress ordered him to spend, Congress no longer has the spending power," the conservative outlet The Bulwark wrote in a post from its official account, @BulwarkOnline, framing the fight as a fundamental question about who controls federal dollars.
The post did not stand alone. Within hours, it was joined by a wave of commentary from outlets across the ideological spectrum, each warning that traditional checks on executive power are eroding. A separate report published roughly ten hours before the @BulwarkOnline post described what it called "radical new steps" by the White House to "wrest the power of the purse from Congress," quoting one observer who said the effort "subvert[s] the basic structure of the American system." That report did not identify the observer by name, and it did not offer independent documentation of the specific spending actions it described. Next News Network could not independently verify the underlying claims about the White House's spending actions.
The concern is not limited to one faction. The Nation, writing under the headline "The People vs. the Supreme Court" roughly eighteen hours before the @BulwarkOnline post, warned that the High Court "has plans to trample even more of our rights" in its coming term. The Washington Post, in a piece published a day earlier, argued that "Congressional hearings are no longer a check on power — they're now a circus," lamenting that lawmakers "seem prepared to let partisan advantage trump cooperation and the public's right to know." And a separate analysis published about six hours before the @BulwarkOnline post asked, "Why Congress Is Losing Power to the Supreme Court in 2023," describing an "unsettling balance of power between Congress and the judiciary in America's political landscape."
Taken together, the commentary reflects a broad and bipartisan anxiety: that the three branches are no longer checking one another as the Founders intended, and that the legislative branch in particular is ceding ground. The @BulwarkOnline post put the stakes in the starkest terms, arguing that the problem is not merely one policy dispute but a structural one. If a president can decline to spend appropriated funds — a practice known as impoundment — and simultaneously direct spending that Congress never authorized, the post argued, the legislature's most powerful tool is effectively neutralized.
That argument has deep roots in American constitutional history. The Constitution grants Congress the authority to levy taxes, borrow money, and appropriate funds for the operation of government. The executive branch's role is to execute those laws, not to rewrite them through spending decisions. For most of the twentieth century, presidents of both parties generally respected that boundary, even when they disagreed with congressional priorities. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed in the wake of Watergate, was designed to formalize the limits on a president's ability to withhold funds Congress had ordered spent. The act created a process by which a president could propose rescissions, but required congressional approval before those funds could be permanently withheld.
The current debate suggests that those guardrails may be under the greatest strain in decades. The White House has not publicly responded to the specific claims circulating in the commentary, and it is not yet known whether any formal legal challenge to the spending actions described in those reports has been filed. Congressional leaders have also not announced a unified response, and it is not yet known whether hearings or legislation are being planned on the matter.
What is clear from the commentary is that the concern is not confined to any one outlet or ideology. The @BulwarkOnline post, The Nation's warning about the Supreme Court, The Washington Post's critique of congressional hearings, and the separate analysis of Congress's declining power all point to a shared diagnosis: the traditional mechanisms of accountability are weakening. Each outlet frames the problem differently — some focus on the executive, some on the judiciary, some on Congress itself — but the common thread is a sense that the balance of power is tilting away from the legislative branch.
The @BulwarkOnline post in particular has become a reference point for those making the structural argument. By reducing the issue to a simple proposition — that Congress cannot be said to hold the purse if the president can both spend unauthorized money and refuse to spend authorized money — the post offers a concise framing that other commentators have picked up and amplified. The argument does not depend on any particular spending dispute; it is a claim about the nature of the constitutional order itself.
Whether that claim is correct is a matter for courts and voters to decide. But the fact that it is being made so forcefully, and echoed so widely, suggests that the debate over the power of the purse is entering a new and more contentious phase. It is not yet known how the White House will respond to the criticism, or whether Congress will take steps to reassert its authority. What is known is that the commentary has moved quickly from the specialized corners of legal journalism into the broader political conversation.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims about the White House's spending actions or the specific characterizations of the judicial and legislative developments described in the other reports.
Our Take
The Framers gave Congress the purse for a reason: they understood that the power to spend is the power to govern. If the executive can spend what it wants and withhold what it does not, then the legislative branch becomes a debating society, not a co-equal branch of government. The commentary from @BulwarkOnline and others is a warning shot at what happens when that principle is abandoned — not by a single administration, but by a political class that has forgotten why the separation of powers exists. Conservatives who spent years defending the Constitution against executive overreach should be the loudest voices demanding that Congress reclaim its authority. The alternative is a government that answers to one person, not to the people's representatives.
