Larry Kudlow: Why shouldn't the President “be able to impound on behalf of the taxpayers?”

Kudlow's suggestion that the president has the power to refuse to spend funds allocated by Congress appears to violate the Impoundment Control Act of 1974

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the March 10, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Kudlow

LARRY KUDLOW (HOST): Back to my impoundment authority issue. If Congress says build a bridge that costs a billion -- a trillion, let's say -- but you can do it for $500 billion then why shouldn't the President do it for half as much? I don't understand that. That's called impoundment, I guess. Why shouldn't he be able to impound on behalf of the taxpayers?

RUSS VOUGHT (OMB DIRECTOR): That's the common sense system that the founders created and it existed for 200 years up until the 1970s, in which Congress put it on its head for the last fifty years. And we are where we are, where we have a use it or lose it, and bureaucracies aren't fundamentally accountable to the President because they're looking to Congress be able to get their purse strings.

Media Matters examined right-wing media calls for impoundment in July 2024:

A partner organization in a large conservative effort to provide policy and personnel recommendations to the next Republican administration, known as Project 2025, has become a leading advocate for the radical position that the president should have broad latitude to refuse to carry out Congressionally mandated spending. 

The ramifications of such a policy would be wide-reaching and could potentially threaten funding for the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, or other conservative targets within the federal government. 

The group pushing for this major expanse of presidential power is the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has deployed several of its top figures to make its argument across right-wing broadcast and digital media. Its most recent salvo came in June, when CRA released a white paper arguing that a 1974 law restricting a president from unilaterally refusing to spend funds allocated by Congress — the so-called “impoundment” power — represented an improper break from historical precedent. Instead, CRA argued that the White House should have the authority to halt Congressional spending virtually at will.

“Congress’s use of its power of the purse to make it illegal for the President to intentionally spend less than the full amount of what appropriated was norm-breaking, unprecedented, and unconstitutional,” CRA senior fellow Mark Paoletta wrote with his co-authors David Shapiro and Brandon Stras. Paoletta and Shaprio have written op-eds advancing the same argument at The Hill and right-wing blog The Federalist. 

Paoletta’s executive branch power grab is an implicit goal of Project 2025, the right-wing policy and staffing initiative organized by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The Center for Renewing America is one of more than 100 partner organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board; its founder, Russ Vought, was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under former President Donald Trump and remains a major figure in MAGA media, in addition to being an open Christian nationalist. 

...

The CRA paper is an attempt to undermine the 1974 Impoundments Control Act, which Congress passed after former President Richard Nixon refused to spend federally allocated funds on “water pollution control, education and health programs and highway and housing construction,” according to The New York Times. Nixon approached the impoundment power as a tool to further centralize power within the office of the President and pursue a reactionary agenda that ran counter to the will of Congress, providing a possible historical template for CRA.