It’s Rescission Time
The politicians who run the GOP on Capitol Hill are about ready to rug-pull Elon Musk and his patron in the Oval Office big time. That is, the so-called “clean CR [continuing resolution]” that Speaker Johnson is apparently cooking up will ratify the entirety of the runaway spending in the last Biden budget, thereby cancelling virtually every single dime that the DOGE operation has purportedly saved.
This awful outlook, of course, is a consequence of the stacked institutional mechanics that Elon Musk is just beginning to grasp.
For example, the appropriations authority for every one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of idiotic foreign aid contracts that DOGE has exposed and cancelled must by law be recycled and respent on another contract. And therefore spent on projects perhaps only slightly less stupid but in any case no less unaffordable.
We are referring to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the passel of UniParty-appointed Federal district judges waiting to pounce in favor of lawsuits claiming funds are being illegally withheld by the executive.
To be sure, the anti-impoundment provisions of the 1974 Act are inconvenient albeit probably consistent with the black letters of the Constitution that delegate the power of the purse to Congress. But fortunately, there is a pretty creative hack that might be the next best thing to the now proscribed impoundment tool that Richard Nixon overused, thereby triggering the rebuke to presidential discretion embodied in the 1974 Act.
To wit, as Elon Musk apparently discovered earlier this week the Congressional rescission tool is a pretty good workaround to unspend money that has already been appropriated. This method of cutting existing spending authority does require Congressional approval within 45 days, but rescissions are subject to an up-or-down vote and no filibuster in the Senate.
So what the DOGE team needs to do right now is bundle up a massive pile of rescissions and send them to Capitol Hill to be voted upon as a pre-cond
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
