Congress rejected some of Trump’s proposed budget cuts. OMB is making them anyway.

For centuries, kings embroiled England in numerous wars on the European continent, largely without consulting Parliament in advance. Monarchs could do this because they alone had the power both to command the armies and to pay them. This bitter experience convinced our nation’s Founders of the importance of giving Congress, not the president, the power of the purse.

Two hundred fifty years later, that crucial choice is under active attack by a White House that increasingly is snatching that power of the purse out of the hands of a feeble Congress.

President Trump’s most direct assault on Congress’s constitutional power of the purse is his repeated claim that he can implement cuts he has proposed to federal programs even after Congress has refused to make precisely those cuts. A unanimous Supreme Court rejected similar attempts to override Congress from President Richard Nixon, but President Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought are undeterred.

Federal law requires the president to initiate the budget process by submitting an annual budget request to Congress each February. As its name implies, this is only a request: it has no force of law. No president’s budget request is enacted without Congress making major changes.

The president’s budget request does include a wealth of financial and programmatic information that helps Congress craft the nation’s actual budget. That is what happens next: Congress determines how much it wants to spend in each major area of the budget, and then assigns the appropriations committees to write detailed funding bills. Inevitably, these add to some of the president’s proposals while trimming or eliminating others. Even in these polarized times, most appropriations legislation is........

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