In February 2026, congressional Democrats refused to vote for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, shutting the department down as its funding lapsed. This attempt to use the power of the purse to constrain executive discretion over immigration enforcement also left Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers working without pay and airports in havoc. But the Trump Administration blunted the impact by reaching for other funds, using money appropriated to “safeguard the borders” in order to pay TSA salaries, even though most U.S. flights are domestic. Legal scholars have said the action violated the fiscal law known as the “Purpose Statute,” which prohibits the reallocation of money designated by Congress for one purpose toward a different purpose.

This diversion of funds is part of an escalating pattern of “appropriations presidentialism.” Over the last several decades, presidents have begun asserting more control over how and when the government spends—and doesn’t spend—money. The Bush and Obama Administrations stretched the boundaries of emergency spending authority during the 2008 financial crisis, deploying Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds for purposes Congress had not specifically authorized. The first Trump Administration reallocated billions in funding from the military and Treasury to construct a border wall that Congress had explicitly declined to fund. This is an attack on the original, core power of the legislature.

While Congress has other powers, like defining the organization of agencies and their authorities, the power of the purse came first and is more flexible and available than any other. The innovation of England’s seventeenth-century Glorious Revolution was to give Parliament power over spending, requiring the monarch to request an annual appropriation of funds for the budget. It was this financial leverage that originally limited the power of the crown and spawned the American separation of powers. Because U.S. congressional appropriations are annual and can be passed through reconciliation, it is easier to exert pressure through the budget than by passing legislation amending agency structure or authority. But that leverage is eroding at a faster and faster clip.

Although past presidents occasionally flouted appropriations law, this Administration has disregarded it at a different scale. During the October 2025 shutdown, the Department of Defense redirected $8 billion in research and development funds to cover military payroll. Experts called the move a likely violation of both the Purpose Statute and the Antideficiency Act, which prevents the federal government from spending more than what is appropriated by Congress. But no one with legal authority could block the payment, and it proceeded. Moreover, even before the shutdown, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had spent far more than its appropriated annual budget, relying on a funding cushion that DHS transferred from other components in moves the bipartisan House Appropriations Committee flagged as “egregious.”

Congress lacks an agent to prevent the executive branch from spending money in defiance of appropriations laws, but it hasn’t always. For most of U.S. history, a comptroller had binding legal authority to block unlawful payments before they went out the door. The comptroller general of the 1920s wielded that power aggressively, and the executive branch obeyed. That authority has since evaporated. With careful legal drafting and real political will, however, it could be recreated to restore Congress’s power of the purse.

The Fiscal Watchdog Congress Forgot

The comptroller was an original member of the Treasury Department as established in 1789. Over the next century, the role evolved into the primary arbiter of lawful and unlawful executive spending. The comptroller of the Treasury’s decisions about a disbursement’s legality bound the entire executive branch, and the comptroller held the power to withhold his signature from warrants to withdraw money from the Treasury—which could prevent a department from acquiring funds in the first place.

Despite that significant power, the role was functionally subordinate to the President. Grover Cleveland reportedly said, “I must have that fund, and if I can not change the opinion of my comptroller, I can change my comptroller.” The President’s power to fire the comptroller at will, in addition to the role’s place inside the very administration making spending decisions, kept comptrollers from taking principled stands against presidential overreach.

Congress attempted to create real independence through a radical reorganization in 1921. It transformed the comptroller into the “comptroller general” as the head of a new, independent agency outside of Treasury then known as the General Accounting Office, now the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The comptroller’s powers were essentially the same, but the officer had a separate budget and offices from Treasury and, most crucially, could only be removed from a 15-year term by a joint resolution of Congress—the same process as passing a new law.

The first comptroller general, John Raymond McCarl, tested the boundaries of the new office almost immediately. His decisions were often severe, like the ruling that naval admirals returning from assignment in Asia could not use government funds for their wives’ travel home. But his reach extended well beyond travel reimbursements. McCarl waged an ongoing campaign against Franklin Roosevelt’s ambitious government programs. The comptroller general prevented Roosevelt from spending $15 million appropriated for drought relief on a tree planting project to prevent future dustbowls, ruling that appropriations for drought relief could not be repurposed for conservation. Roosevelt tried to neuter GAO through reorganization efforts twice and failed; Congress needed an independent watchdog, even if a majority supported most of the President’s Depression-era plans. McCarl’s successors shifted the office’s focus from blocking payments to auditing them after the fact, and GAO evolved into a congressional support agency that rarely took independent action. But the comptroller general’s formal authority remained intact, until the Supreme Court stripped it away.

How the Watchdog Lost Its Teeth

In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Bowsher v. Synar and gutted the comptroller general’s authority. The decision built on a 1983 case holding that Congress could only take legally binding action by passing a law. Because the comptroller general was removable only with Congress’s participation, the Court reasoned, the office was congressional and therefore it was unconstitutional for it to exercise executive power. The comptroller general’s decisions were no longer legally binding on the executive branch.

At the time, the ruling was understood narrowly as addressing one provision in a particular statute governing deficit reduction targets. Congress quickly passed a fallback provision as though Bowsher created only a minor procedural defect. But the ruling’s logic reached much further: If the comptroller general was a legislative officer who could not exercise executive functions, then all of the comptroller’s traditional powers, like blocking payments, settling accounts, and countersigning Treasury warrants, were unconstitutional.

The comptroller general’s opinions became advisory overnight. GAO could still investigate and report, but when the executive branch disagreed, it could just say so and move on. In 2014, GAO concluded that the Obama Administration’s transfer of five Taliban detainees in a swap for captured U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl violated appropriations law by spending nearly a million dollars without authorization and failing to give Congress 30 days’ notice about the plan. The Department of Defense offered a different legal interpretation, and theirs won out simply because the military controlled the actual disbursement of funds. GAO could do nothing but issue a report.

The first Trump Administration went a step further and formalized the rejection of GAO authority outright. After a shutdown standoff from December 2018 to January 2019, GAO held that the Interior Department had unlawfully diverted national park maintenance funds to cover operational expenses so the parks could stay open, minimizing public backlash against the shutdown. Interior rejected the decision without offering an alternative legal interpretation. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) then issued a memo to executive branch agencies stating that GAO decisions are not binding and agencies need not follow GAO legal interpretations. Without legal authority to enforce its decisions, GAO had no recourse. And Congress has no reliable path to court; in the 1997 Raines v. Byrd decision, the Supreme Court held that individual legislators lack standing to challenge appropriations violations. Suing as an institution would require a House majority opposed to the President and willing to enforce spending laws a prior Congress had passed—a rare alignment.

The remedies Congress does have, like shutdowns, appropriations riders, and threatening to withhold future funding, are blunt instruments the executive has learned to circumvent. During the recent DHS shutdown, the Administration found other pots of money to keep favored programs running and wait Congress out. The executive’s ability to soften a shutdown’s visible effects by redirecting funds saps Congress’s leverage. And lawmakers’ inability to rein in unauthorized spending makes it equally difficult to prevent impoundment. Congress’s primary tool against a President who refuses to spend appropriated money is to cut funding for programs the President cares about. That tool is worthless if the President can simply backfill from other accounts.

A Comptroller Commission

Congress can fix this by creating a new independent agency firmly housed within the executive branch. GAO could remain as a congressional agency in its advisory and auditing capacity, though its head may need a new title. The new entity should have real enforcement power: direct access to the federal payment system, authority to review disbursements for compliance with appropriations law, the power to freeze payments, and the responsibility to countersign Treasury warrants (or refuse when a withdrawal violates congressional spending directives).

The entity should be structured as a multimember, bipartisan Comptroller Commission. Its members would be appointed by the President with Senate confirmation, and Congress would play no statutory role in their removal except through impeachment. This avoids the Bowsher problem entirely. The commission’s role would be ministerial, enforcing Congress’s spending directives as written without substituting commissioners’ own policy preferences. This framing both constrains the office and strengthens the constitutional argument for its authority. The commission would be executing Congress’s will, not exercising independent judgment—which answers the concern that a new comptroller could become a tool of obstruction, as McCarl sometimes was.

The hardest problem is independence. A multimember, bipartisan commission can currently be protected from presidential removal under existing precedent, and committee-level decision-making would reduce the risk of punitive or arbitrary action. But the Supreme Court may soon require that the President be able to remove every executive agency head at will. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau demonstrates what happens next: After the Court struck down its director’s for-cause removal protection, a new President hostile to its mission replaced the director and functionally shut the agency down. Structural design choices have real consequences for institutional survival.

If for-cause removal protection is unavailable, the best alternative is to make removal costly. Unanimous approval from the commission would be required for every apportionment from OMB to be disbursed to an agency’s budget. Since apportionments are typically quarterly, firing even a single commissioner would trigger a shutdown by the end of the quarter unless the Senate confirmed a successor before then. That makes the President the initiator of the shutdown and the focal point of public displeasure over its consequences, instead of the legislature taking political blame. In practice, the commission would rubberstamp apportionments unless a legal concern required additional review. The approval mechanism would primarily act as a dead man’s switch to discourage removal.

The commission’s account-settlement authority would also address impoundment, which is how most of the Trump Administration’s appropriations law violations are best characterized. When a President freezes funds owed to an existing grant recipient or contract counterparty, the commission could settle the account and release the funds directly through the payment system. The grantee or contractor gets its money under the terms Congress set, without filing a lawsuit. Even if the commission is limited to declaratory authority rather than direct payment, a binding determination that the recipient is owed the money would let them collect without relitigating the merits. They could skip the slow Court of Claims process that currently makes impoundment fights so asymmetric. Prospective impoundment is harder to fix; if the executive refuses to issue new grants or identify new recipients, no comptroller can make those spending decisions for an agency. But the commission still strengthens Congress’s hand by preventing the President from backfilling through fund diversions when Congress cuts agency budgets.

The timing is right for these reforms. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro’s 15-year term expired in December 2025, and the agency has since been led by an acting comptroller general from the civil service. Congress has taken no action to convene the committee that recommends a replacement for the President to nominate, and multiple organizations have published calls to reconfigure GAO and the office of the comptroller general. The structural questions about the office’s future are already on the table.

Presidents are getting more brazen in how they move money around, increasingly treating appropriations law as a set of suggestions rather than binding rules. The founders created the comptroller in 1789 to prevent exactly this. The office should be revitalized in a form that passes modern constitutional scrutiny while establishing the power and independence required to make the office effective.

Either party could find itself with a congressional majority whose spending directives are ignored by a President of the opposite party. The next Congress, whatever its composition, will face an executive branch that has spent two years learning how to redirect funds, reprogram accounts, and treat appropriations restrictions as advisory. The power of the purse is Congress’s most fundamental check on the executive, but a power that cannot be enforced is a mere ornament. The comptroller general position is waiting for an appointment, and what a potentially revitalized office could look like is already being debated. What remains to be seen is whether Congress will settle for another auditor or build a watchdog with teeth.