For Found House, the saga began when the White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo freezing all federal grants and loans on Jan. 27, following an executive order from President Donald Trump requiring all federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to … disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”
Legal experts argue the executive order directly violated Article I of the Constitution and decades of legal opinion. Cerin Lindgrensavage and William Ford, staff for the nonpartisan, anti-authoritarian nonprofit Protect Democracy wrote the Trump administration was trying “to wrest the spending power away from Congress and into the hands of the president and his appointees.”
“The system of checks and balances the Founders designed does not give the president unchecked power to execute only the laws passed by Congress that he agrees with,” they wrote. “When Congress appropriates funds, the president must spend them.”
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