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DeLauro, in New Haven on Monday: “What they are doing is illegal.”
WASHINGTON — As the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro has an outsized role in determining what programs the federal government spends its money on.
But since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, she’s spending her time making sure that money is actually being spent.
DeLauro is on a mission to get the White House to use all the funding approved by Congress on the programs lawmakers approved. Instead, Trump has refused to fund programs approved by Congress and signed into law.
“What they are doing is illegal,” DeLauro said in an interview at the U.S. Capitol.
“What President Trump and the House Republicans are doing is stealing appropriated dollars — that’s the taxpayer dollars — that were congressionally directed, passed in the House and the Senate, signed by the president, and just taking them for their own purposes in order for them to have dollars for tax cuts for the rich, wealthiest, and billionaires and for the the biggest corporations in the country,” DeLauro said.
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.
The funding freezes to date have blocked more than $425 billion in spending, according to DeLauro and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
DeLauro and Murray have posted an online tracker to highlight which programs and agencies are not getting the funding that Congress approved. They regularly update it with the latest numbers.
”No American president has ever so flagrantly ignored our nation’s spending laws or so brazenly denied the American people investments they are owed,” the two women said.
DeLauro has returned to this theme over and over again.
“There is no inherent authority for the president to impound or steal funds and never has been,” she said on the House floor last week. “Over 200 years of American history say so. Our founding fathers designed our government so.”
At the House Rules Committee, she said: “Since taking office, the Trump administration has unlawfully stolen funds appropriated by Congress, passed by Republicans and Democrats in the House and in the Senate and signed into law by the president, upending the separation of powers and our Constitutional order. My colleagues, there is no inherent authority for the president to impound and never has been.”
Trump and his budget director, Russell Vought, insist that the 1974 law preventing the president from refusing to spend congressionally approved funds without following specific procedures, the Impoundment Control Act, is unconstitutional. They have insisted on the right to unilaterally block funding.
But the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the congressional watchdog agency that is investigating more than three dozen Trump administration funding freezes, said otherwise.
The GAO said Monday that the president wrongly blocked $30 million for the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, which provides aid to local libraries across the country.
“This is not complicated: Congress passed, and the president signed into law, billions in investments in critical infrastructure and support for communities across the country — such as critical funding that the Institute of Museum and Library Services owes to public libraries across the country — and those promises must be delivered,” DeLauro said in a statement after the GAO ruling.
The GAO last month said Trump violated the law when he cut off $3.2 billion in funding to build electric vehicle charging stations.
And the watchdog said OMB violated the law when it took down the website listing what the government spent taxpayer dollars on.
“They’re supposed to spend it in this way,” DeLauro said. “They are also supposed to – which they’re violating the law -– be transparent so that we know how the dollars are being spent, when they’re going out, etc. They pulled that website down, which is in violation of the law, and they continue to look at stealing [the appropriations].”
DeLauro said highlighting this issue might convince some members of the House Republican majority to join her in opposing Trump’s actions.
“We’re going to have the opportunity to stand up and fight back,” DeLauro said. “My hope is that some of my Republican colleagues will understand that the power of the purse is being destroyed and taken away from the Congress.”