President Donald Trump’s overhauling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) simultaneously forces legal and political fights on three fronts that are sacred cows to the political establishment, and winning those fights against the Swamp would fundamentally restore transparent and accountable government to a degree not seen in many decades.
Those three issues are reining in out-of-control spending, restoring democratic accountability in government, and restructuring bloated and ineffective government. Each of those is sparking lawsuits and could lead to congressional action, and could ultimately transform the federal government.
First, spending.
When a president does not spend money that Congress has appropriated it is called an impoundment. This amounts to testing the limits of presidential power under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), or even having the Supreme Court strike down the ICA as unconstitutional.
White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought and OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta have long contended that the ICA is unconstitutional, and that in any event the ICA allows for temporary pauses in distributing funds to verify that those funds are being spent efficiently and in accordance with the president’s priorities.
The nonprofit led by Vought over the past four years before he returned for a second stint at OMB – the Center for Renewing America – published a detailed legal paper written by Paoletta explaining the ICA’s unconstitutionality and another paper on the history of presidents declining to spend congressionally appropriated funds. As Paoletta observes, “there is a long history and tradition of Presidents employing impoundment to control Executive Branch expenditures and promote economy and efficiency in government,” as far back as Washington and Jefferson.
Those policy memos from Vought and Paoletta also argue that a president’s “duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed also includes an obligation to seek to achieve an appropriation’s ends in the most efficient and responsible manner possible.”
There is a long history of presidents declining to spend funds. For example, Harry Truman declined to spend funds on 10 Air Force groups because of what Truman said was “the need to maintain a balance between national security and a sound economy … and the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief.”
A message appears on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) website on February 05, 2025. The Trump administration issued a directive late Tuesday night that all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, and the administration will terminate contracts that are not determined to be essential. (Photo Illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Similarly, John F. Kennedy impounded $180 million out of $380 million appropriated by Congress for strategic bombers, deeming the extra money unnecessary because of recent advancements in missile technology.
More recently, Republicans in Congress appropriated funds to build a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem during previous presidencies, but those presidents decided that moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would interfere with presidential management of foreign affairs. It was not until President Trump’s first term that the embassy was moved.
The reason is simple. As Vought’s organization explains, “this power has long been understood to inhere in the executive power vested by Article II [of the Constitution], and therefore, it is not constitutionally proper for Congress to seek to abridge this constitutionally vested authority.”
With historical examples like those, USAID’s spending begged for presidential pushback. It’s hard to see how taxpayers spending $70,000 on an Irish DEI musical, $47,000 on transgender operas in Colombia, and $32,000 on a transgender comic book in Peru advance America’s foreign policy interests.
But those are not even the big-ticket items. Taxpayers funded $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes, $20 million for Sesame Street in Iraq, $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala, and $1 million to tell people in Vietnam not to burn trash. And why should Americans pay $15 million for condoms and other birth control in Afghanistan?
Given the extravagant absurdities that USAID funded, it is no wonder that President Trump seeks to put an end to what many would regard as misuses of taxpayer money, and at minimum spending that is not consistent with this elected president’s programs and priorities.
And impounding that money – keeping it in the treasury for other priorities – would restore the longstanding historical understanding that congressional appropriations are a ceiling, not a floor. The Constitution says that no agency can spend money beyond what Congress appropriates. It is completely unworkable to demand that the government stick the landing of spending every single dollar up to that limit that can never be crossed.
Second, democratic accountability.
Until 1935, it was uncontested that the president has unrestricted authority to remove every political appointee in the executive branch. Before then, as recently as 1926 the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Myers that the power of a president to remove a political appointee from office is part and parcel of the president’s power to appoint that officer in the first place.
But in Humphrey’s Executor, an increasingly liberal Supreme Court in 1935 held that Congress could remove so-called “independent agencies” because their actions are sometimes partly legislative or judicial, rather than purely executive, and thus that the chief executive (i.e., the president) does not need to have complete supervision over them.
That cannot be squared with anything in the Constitution, but that is nonetheless what the Supreme Court said, and so it’s the law – at least for the moment. In recent years the Supreme Court has chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor and seems poised to overrule it.
But firing employees at USAID goes beyond political accountability of high-ranking appointed officers to include career employees as well. There have been job protections for federal workers since 1883 when Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Subsequent laws have expanded those protections to become so extensive that it is almost impossible to fire a federal employee, and even then, only after a long and elaborate process.
Many USAID employees will almost certainly sue over their firings. With reportedly only 294 employees out of more than 10,000 being kept, there will be lawsuits. Those cases will explore the legal limits of how a president can ensure that those working under him are accountable to him as the nation’s chief executive and the leader elected by the American people.
In any other context, the commonsense result is that of course those employees can be let go. In any company where a worker or a team is found to be operating in a way that is incompatible with – or worse, contrary to – the agenda of the CEO, that worker or team would have to go. Most Americans would be shocked to learn that the federal government would be any different. These court cases will assert the president’s inherent authority to exercise that same commonsense principle.
And finally, the president’s authority over the structuring of the executive branch.
Congress creates government agencies by law, and the president has inherent authority under the Constitution to organize his own White House. But presidents also claim that Congress provides underlying authority in preexisting laws to establish additional agencies, such as USAID, which was first created by Kennedy in 1961 by Executive Order 10973. (Congress later ratified USAID’s creation in 1998.)
The questions that will arise from reducing the size and role of USAID and possibly making it a component of the State Department will examine how far a president can go in reorganizing a dysfunctional and bloated government.
Again, the president’s team knows they will get sued for this. And the Swamp will certainly file suit in liberal jurisdictions where they will expect favorable rulings. But this is a long game of eventually getting to the Supreme Court, likely in 2026.
But here’s the kicker: President Trump does not need to win all those lawsuits to achieve the historic reforms he seeks. There are multiple routes to victory.
For one, there is a parallel here with what the Supreme Court did with part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Section 5 of the VRA required certain states and localities – mostly in the South – to get “preclearance” from the U.S. Department of Justice before changing any voting laws or procedures. Conservatives argued this was a violation of state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment, and the 1966 Supreme Court decision upholding Section 5 emphasized that only extreme racism that was widespread in certain places in the 1960s made such federal supervision constitutional in those places.
But years later in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court in 2013 declined to revisit the constitutionality of Section 5, instead holding that the formula found in neighboring Section 4 for determining which states needed preclearance was outdated – holding that “current burdens [on state sovereignty] must be justified by current needs” – and tasking Congress with passing a new formula.
Congress was unable to do so because racism is no longer concentrated in certain states – and does not resemble the appalling abuses of the past – so the entire preclearance regime became defunct without repealing or invalidating Section 5.
Many of these legal challenges over USAID could reach similar results, not directly addressing the central questions, but agreeing on an essential secondary issue, without which the program or component President Trump is targeting can no longer function in a way that created the problem in the first place.
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Another route to victory could in some respects be similar to how Franklin D. Roosevelt began his presidency in 1933. FDR took unprecedented steps right out of the gate, many of which were challenged in court. He won some of those cases while losing others. But even on issues where he lost, he so profoundly changed the political landscape on those issues that the size and shape of government caught up in just a few years, and by 1937 the Supreme Court let many of those later changes stand that had initially been invalidated.
So too, President Trump can create a “new normal” in key areas of government that, if the American people embrace them, will become lasting changes through the political process and popular support rather than court victories alone.
Major changes in spending, personnel, and government structure might achieve such widespread support, as most Americans will recognize those principles as applying in their everyday lives.
“Most Americans understand all this to be common sense,” Ambassador Ken Blackwell, chairman of the Conservative Action Project and chairman of a center at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview. “The idea that any organization is required by law to waste money or to spend it in a manner contrary to the agenda of the organization’s chief executive would be considered crazy by most reasonable people.”
“You can’t run a household or a company that way, so most Americans rightly believe you can’t successfully run a country that way either,” Blackwell added.
President Trump’s first couple weeks demonstrate a determination to make major changes to a governmental system that most Americans agree does not work as it should, and is willing to fight for those issues in court, in Congress, and to take those issues straight to the American people.
The president ran promising to make such changes, and the American people are in for quite a ride as the president tackles supporters of the status quote to deliver on those promises.
Breitbart News senior legal contributor Ken Klukowski is a lawyer who served in the White House and Justice Department. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @kenklukowski.
