“The official definition of “impoundment,” per the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that oversees the practice, is “any action or inaction by an officer or employee of the federal government that precludes obligation or expenditure of budget authority.” In other words: any time someone in the federal government doesn’t spend money that Congress has ordered it to spend.
This takes two forms: rescission, and deferral. In rescission, the spending is simply canceled, while in deferral it is withheld temporarily, in theory to be spent in the future. Under the Impoundment Control Act, passed in 1974, both rescissions and deferrals can be passed by Congress at any time, and they can also be requested by the president. But any presidential requests have to be approved by Congress to take effect, and that has happened quite rarely.”
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“The GAO has also recognized a practice called “programmatic delay,” which it views as not technically impoundment but which is closely related. Programmatic delays occur when the government is trying to spend money Congress has instructed it to spend, but factors outside their control preclude this. The GAO has offered as an example a program in which the government is supposed to provide a certain amount of money in loans, but where there are few applicants so the program simply cannot lend out the total amount Congress has set aside for this purpose.
Another more recent example was Biden’s executive order upon taking office instructing a pause in the construction of border walls and fences with Mexico. While Congress had appropriated money specifically for border barriers, the GAO ruled that the Biden administration was merely “programmatically delaying” the project, because the delays were chalked up to environmental reviews and other hurdles that it was legally required to clear before continuing construction.
Programmatic delay does offer the executive branch some flexibility in spending, but only a bit. Otherwise, the Impoundment Control Act is very clear: The president cannot refuse to spend money that Congress has told him to spend. The GAO is empowered to challenge the president if it sees this limitation being contradicted, as it did when Trump withheld funds from Ukraine in 2019. In that case, the funds were eventually released and the incident led to Trump’s impeachment.”
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“The power becomes truly interesting, however, if Trump insists upon cuts that Congress will not approve. One could imagine a repeat of the 2017 fight to repeal Obamacare, except, when enough Republicans defect to doom the effort in Congress, Trump and Vought opt to simply impound funds for the Medicaid expansion and Affordable Care Act premium subsidies unilaterally. This would inevitably provoke a legal challenge that could make its way to the Supreme Court.”
“Trump’s share of the Black and Latino vote increased by 8 points each between 2020 and 2024.
Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there’s probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump’s growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration.
There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans’ attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden’s term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes.”
“because of its winner-take-all nature, the Electoral College isn’t a good measure of closeness. Imagine an election where one candidate wins every state and district 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent. That candidate would romp to a 538-0 victory in the Electoral College, but that election was obviously still very close. The same principle was at play in the 2024 election: Trump won six of the seven major swing states (Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) by 3.2 points or less. And he won Wisconsin by just 0.9 points, Michigan by just 1.4 points and Pennsylvania by just 1.7 points.
That’s important because if Harris had won those three states (plus all the states and districts she actually did win), she would have gotten exactly 270 Electoral College votes.”
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“if Harris had done just 1.8 points better across the board — or even just in those three states (although that’s not usually how elections work) — she would be the president-elect right now.”
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“There have been 20 presidential elections since the end of World War II, and in only six of them was the tipping-point state decided by a smaller margin than Pennsylvania was decided by this year.”
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“the same is true if you look at the Electoral College margin, Trump’s main claim to landslide status. His likely 86-electoral-vote margin over Harris is larger than the 77 electoral votes he won by in 2016 or the 74 electoral votes that President Joe Biden won by in 2020. But it’s smaller than the 126 electoral votes that Obama won by in 2012 and the 192 electoral votes that Obama won by in 2008. And once again, it is only the 14th-biggest Electoral College victory since the end of World War II.”
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“Another way to assess the closeness of an election is, of course, the national popular vote. While the popular vote doesn’t affect who actually wins the election, it can be relevant in discussions of how big of a mandate the winner has to govern. By this measure as well, 2024 was a historically close election. Since the end of World War II, only three elections had popular-vote margins smaller than Trump’s current 1.6-point lead: 1960, 1968 and 2000.”
“Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to replace Christopher Wray as director of the FBI, has threatened to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens” and “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” What exactly does he mean by that? Given the position that Patel will hold if he is confirmed by the Senate, the answer could have serious implications not only for the anti-Trump journalists he has in mind but also for freedom of the press generally.”
“Right-wing populism is a strange bird, an ideology that’s not grounded in any enduring economic or philosophical principles. It mainly entails using the government to address a variety of ill-formed social, nationalistic, and cultural grievances. Former British politician David Gauke was spot on when he says that populism amounts to little more than “a willingness by politicians to say what they think the public wants to hear.”
That’s why President-elect Donald Trump’s recent appointments reflect a mish-mash of conflicting opinions. Many conservatives were, for instance, shocked by his selection of Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R–Ore.) as Labor Secretary given that her pro-union positions aren’t different from those advocated by President Joe Biden.”
A lot of the public were Googling if Biden dropped out right before the election. Maybe a primary would have helped informed the public about Democratic candidates’ positions.
“the Treasury Department issued another reminder about the cost of doing nothing to change course. The national debt hit $36 trillion—less than four months after surpassing the $35 trillion mark.
Evenly divided, that means every American is now six figures in the red, thanks to the decisions made in Washington, D.C., over the past few decades. The trajectory ahead looks no better. The federal government is on pace to run multitrillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future—and that’s the rosy scenario, which assumes no recessions, wars, pandemics, and the like. Measured against the size of the U.S. economy, the debt is approaching the record high set in the final year of World War II. The rising debt means higher annual interest payments that will complicate the federal budget, likely require higher taxes, and make everyone poorer.”