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Five Former Treasury Secretaries: Our Democracy Is Under Siege
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/treasure-secretaries-doge-musk.htmlFREE read: https://archive.ph/4DxXc
By Robert E. Rubin, Lawrence H. Summers, Timothy F. Geithner, Jacob J. Lew and Janet L. Yellen
The writers are former Treasury secretaries.
...
We were fortunate that during our tenures in office no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments. Regrettably, recent reporting gives substantial cause for concern that such efforts are underway today. . . .
In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds. . . .
While significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning, the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming. We take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.
A key component of the rule of law is the executive branch’s commitment to respect Congress’s power of the purse: The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent.
The role of the Treasury Department — and of the executive branch more broadly — is not to make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court previously wrote, “Even the president does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds.” Chief Justice John Roberts agrees: He wrote that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.”
We were fortunate that during our tenures in office no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments. Regrettably, recent reporting gives substantial cause for concern that such efforts are underway today. . . .
In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds. . . .
While significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning, the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming. We take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.
A key component of the rule of law is the executive branch’s commitment to respect Congress’s power of the purse: The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent.
The role of the Treasury Department — and of the executive branch more broadly — is not to make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court previously wrote, “Even the president does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds.” Chief Justice John Roberts agrees: He wrote that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.”
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