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Commerce is the boss and the president is the employee when it comes to how to spend the

taxpayers' dollars. If you have an employee and you trust them with a lot of things, and there's like one or two instances where they break the trust or

kind of go outside the line, that might not ruin the system or something. But then if they're

just breaking the trust all of the time, then it could break down that entire system. You might

need to rethink how you structure your oversight

of that employee altogether. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Molly Reynolds, senior fellow at Brookings

and senior editor at Lawfare with Matt Lawrence, Associate Professor of Law at Emory,

Eloise Passacoff, Professor of Law at Georgetown, and Zach Price, Professor of Law at UC Law,

San Francisco.

It's not that the Impoundment Control Act itself is what is making impoundments unconstitutional or illegal.

The president has no inherent constitutional authority to impound, and that's kind of regardless of whether there's a statute on the books or not.

Today, we're talking about the president, Congress, and the power of the purse.

We're going to talk about a new paper.

The three of you have written called Appropriations Presidentialism.

We'll get into what that means.

But I want to start off with what I think is a really helpful framing in the paper, which is a frame of the annual congressional appropriations process, the process by which Congress allocates the discretionary federal budget, which is about a third of what the federal government spends in a given year.

You talk about that as being de facto stable, but de jure fragile.

...