Congress just willingly surrendered a lot of its power to Trump by passing the CR [View all]

[DSandra]

This is essentially the modern day enabling act for Trump:

“Instead of setting clear rules, it lets Trump’s administration – including Elon Musk and his “DOGE” team – decide where much of the money goes, creating what Democratic Senator Patty Murray has called “slush funds” that Trump and Musk could use however they want.

It also gets rid of all earmarks from the past year without giving legislators a chance to add new ones. An “earmark” is when the Congress sets aside money for a specific project or group instead of letting the executive branch decide how to spend it. By cutting out earmarks, this CR doesn’t just slash funding – it also shifts decision-making power away from elected representatives and into the hands of Trump’s administration and billionaires like Elon Musk. That’s bad for democracy and bad for everyday Americans.”

- https://www.commoncause.org/articles/house-republicans-new-spending-plan-is-a-power-grab-for-trump-and-musk-democrats-must-say-no


And from appropriations.senate.gov

“As suspected, this full-year CR would hand vast discretion over spending decisions to President Trump and his administration to zero out programs and redirect funding as they see fit.
➢ Whereas Congress typically provides scores of specific funding directives for key program and priorities in full-year funding bills and the accompanying explanatory statements, under this full-year CR, hundreds of those congressional directives fall away.
➢ This creates slush funds for the Trump administration to reshape spending priorities, eliminate longstanding programs, pick winners and losers, and more.
➢ Failing to provide specific funding directives from Congress means the Trump administration has fewer legal constraints on what it can do.
➢ House Republicans could have addressed this glaring problem—but chose not to. Their yearlong CR includes plenty of unnecessary anomalies but doesn’t address this fundamental issue because they prefer slush funds for this administration to cut the programs it wants in order to fund Trump’s priorities instead.”

- https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/250308_johnsons_yearlong_crpdf.pdf