Perhaps the most pressing issue facing President Donald Trump and the new Congress is the exploding national debt. Most of the debate about how to corral the debt has focused on Congress’s spending and tax bills, or on its efforts to reform entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. But one of the greatest dangers to America’s solvency in recent years has come not from Congress but from the presidency. Though the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power of the purse, Congress has granted the president vast discretion to increase spending at a whim. Former President Joe Biden took unprecedented advantage of those powers and pushed them further than even Congress imagined. President Trump and Congress should rein them in again.
The scale of Biden’s executive spending is hard to convey. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that Biden’s executive actions added up to $1.4 trillion to the deficit. For comparison, it estimated that Trump’s executive actions in his first term added $13 billion to the deficit, or about 1 percent of Biden’s amount.
And Biden’s executive spending total was much lower than he wanted it to be. The Supreme Court blocked his attempt to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans. After the ruling, however, Biden promised to move ahead with more student debt relief. By the end of his term, he had canceled $175 billion in loans and had plans for canceling hundreds of billions of dollars more.
Biden’s executive expenditures made even many of the grandest spending bills from his term pale in comparison. Consider the CHIPS Act of 2022, one of the most hotly debated issues in Congress. The government estimated that the act would raise the deficit by $79 billion. Yet, a single Biden rule expanding Medicaid will add $135 billion in deficits over the next ten years.
The stimulus bill Biden signed soon after entering office contained $12 billion in extra funds for food stamp and general nutrition. But immediately after that funding ran out, Biden, without a vote in either house, increased payments to food stamp recipients by at least $180 billion. He also ended work requirements for food stamp recipients, which added another $11 billion to the deficit.
Under Biden, congressional acts sometimes intersected with executive ones to create prodigious new budgetary costs. The Inflation Reduction Act expanded the tax credit for those buying electric vehicles, which Congress estimated would cost about $14 billion by 2031. But Biden’s IRS loosened the rules for claiming the credits, leading more people to receive them. At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency added a new regulation effectively mandating that the majority of cars should be electric by the early 2030s, meaning even more car owners would get the credit. Congress raised its cost estimate by more than ten times. Some independent studies put the cost of the credit at almost $400 billion.
Congress did make an effort to control executive spending during Biden’s presidency. As part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, it established Administrative Pay-As-You-Go, or PAYGO, which requires the president to offset executive actions that boost spending with cuts elsewhere. But the rule had huge loopholes, and it has been honored mainly in the breach. Biden actually implemented more executive spending after the Fiscal Responsibility Act than before it.
During his first term, Trump offset some of his large deficit-increasing executive decisions with revenue-raising tariffs. But overall, he limited executive spending far more than Biden. In his new term, he has also promised to end several of Biden’s deficit-expanding actions. With a president less interested in executive spending, it’s a good time for Congress to recapture its power of the purse. The Strengthening Administrative PAYGO Act, introduced in the last Congress, would go a long way toward restoring Congress’s primacy.
The Constitution says that “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” But now the Treasury and the administrative bureaucracy have transformed from agents of Congress, merely dispersing funds, to effective legislatures deciding what to appropriate. These executive spending programs will keep costing taxpayer trillions unless they are stopped. To save the government from a future fiscal crisis, the old constitutional order should be restored.
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