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On the Scent31

The Capitol Audit: We Graded Congress's Power of the Purse. It Got a 31.

FREEDOM BEAGLE STAFF · JULY 26, 2026

Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 is one sentence: no money leaves the federal Treasury except “in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” It is arguably the single sharpest check the Framers gave Congress over the executive — the power to fund a policy or starve it. This audit grades how that design actually functions in 2026: the clause’s legal force, the process Congress uses to exercise it, and what happens when the other branch tries to route around it. Same method as every institutional entry in this series — one design feature at a time, scored 0–100, every measurement cited. Reporting on documents, not legal advice.

The pattern

The Appropriations Clause itself is not in trouble. Courts have never let a president unilaterally rewrite what Congress appropriated — that principle is settled law, reaffirmed as recently as 1998. What’s in trouble is everything Congress does upstream of that protection. The Constitution never required Congress to pass twelve individual spending bills by October 1 each year; that’s a self-imposed target from the 1974 budget process, and Congress has not hit it in a single fiscal year since 1997. In its place: continuing resolutions, giant omnibus packages, and — when even those fail — shutdowns. The government spent 43 of the last twelve months without funding for parts of itself, across three separate lapses. And in 2025, for the first time in decades, a president tried something closer to Nixon-era impoundment: withholding money Congress had already appropriated, daring Congress and the courts to stop him. The Supreme Court’s answer, twice, was split down the middle.

The scored card

The usual warning: every factual figure below is a measurement, cited to a court ruling, a statute, or a documented case count. The final grade is not. It is the journal’s editorial judgment of how well each design feature actually functions in 2026. We publish the reasoning so you can argue with the math.

Scale: 85+ functioning as designed, no real erosion · 65–84 solid, real but limited strain · 45–64 mixed — meaningful erosion alongside real function · 25–44 substantially bypassed in practice · under 25 functionally hollowed out.

90
1

The Appropriations Clause's exclusivity

Clinton v. City of New York (1998)

The clause's core promise — that only a law Congress actually passed can move money out of the Treasury — remains fully intact, and the reason is a direct test of it. The Line Item Veto Act of 1996 gave the president power to cancel individual spending items inside signed legislation. Bill Clinton used it to cancel a New York Medicaid provision and an Idaho potato-cooperative tax break, and the Supreme Court struck the whole scheme down in Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417 (1998), 6-3, holding that letting a president unilaterally amend a bill after signing it violates the Presentment Clause. Only a new act of Congress — passed by both chambers, presented to the president — can change what has been appropriated. The one direct attempt to give the executive a unilateral cutting tool failed at the Supreme Court and has not been retried.

8
2

Regular order

12 individual bills, on time, by October 1

Congress has not passed all twelve annual appropriations bills individually by the October 1 fiscal-year deadline since FY1997 — the last time it happened. Per the Congressional Research Service, Congress has failed to pass a single spending bill by that date in 13 of the last 15 fiscal years, and has never passed more than five of the twelve bills on time in that span. This is a process failure, not a constitutional one — nothing in Article I sets that deadline, and money that eventually gets appropriated by CR or omnibus still satisfies the clause's text. But "eventually, in a rush, bundled with everything else" is a different Congress than the one Article I was written to describe.

20
3

Continuing resolutions & omnibus dependence

207 CRs since FY1977

Congress enacted 207 continuing resolutions between FY1977 and FY2025, per CRS — the stopgap has been a fixture of the process since the 1980s. Omnibus bills, first used as a one-off in 1950, are now routine: 18 separate omnibus packages between FY2012 and FY2024 alone, 11 of which had unrelated policy riders bundled in alongside the actual spending. CRs and omnibus bills are still "Appropriations made by Law" in the clause's literal sense. What they are not is the bill-by-bill, committee-vetted process the twelve-subcommittee structure was built around — a norm that has eroded to the point where its absence is the norm.

15
4

Government shutdowns as negotiating leverage

43 days, Oct–Nov 2025 — the longest in U.S. history

A shutdown is the Appropriations Clause working exactly as designed in one narrow sense: without a law, money genuinely stops flowing. What the Framers didn't design is a shutdown as a routine bargaining chip. The October–November 2025 shutdown ran 43 days over expiring ACA subsidies, surpassing the 35-day December 2018–January 2019 shutdown as the longest in U.S. history; CRS estimated it cut roughly 1.5 percentage points off Q4 2025 GDP growth. Two more funding lapses followed within the same fiscal year: a roughly four-day lapse from January 31–February 3, 2026 affecting about half of federal departments, and a Department of Homeland Security-specific lapse from February 14 through April 30, 2026. Three shutdowns inside one twelve-month span is not a rare failure state anymore — it's a recurring feature of how spending bills now get negotiated.

30
5

The Impoundment Control Act

Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (2025)

Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 after Nixon withheld appropriated funds unilaterally, requiring the president to notify Congress before rescinding or delaying appropriated money and giving GAO independent authority to enforce it. In 2025, the Trump administration withheld billions in appropriated USAID and foreign-aid funding, and GAO — in formal decisions B-337805 and B-330330 — concluded the withholding violated the Act, including through a "pocket rescission" maneuver GAO found unlawful on its face. The Supreme Court split on it twice. In March 2025, in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, No. 24A831, the Court denied the administration's request to block a lower court's order to release roughly $2 billion, 5-4. By September 2025, in the consolidated Global Health Council v. Trump, the Court reversed course 5-4 and let the administration withhold roughly $4–5 billion — a procedural ruling on the emergency docket, not a decision that impoundment itself is constitutional. A law built specifically to stop this has an enforcement agency saying it was broken, and a Supreme Court that has ruled both ways without settling the underlying question.

22
6

The debt ceiling

12 standoffs, 2011–2023

The debt ceiling is not the Appropriations Clause — it's a separate statutory borrowing limit, currently codified at 31 U.S.C. § 3101, that lets Congress appropriate spending and then separately refuse to authorize the borrowing needed to pay for obligations it already enacted into law. GAO counts twelve debt-limit impasses between 2011 and 2023, all eventually resolved. The 2011 standoff alone raised federal borrowing costs by an estimated $1.3 billion in that fiscal year, per GAO; the 2023 standoff was resolved only through the Fiscal Responsibility Act suspending the limit, after Senate Budget Committee staff and outside estimates warned a default could cost millions of jobs. It is a mechanism Congress built on top of its own spending power and now periodically uses to threaten the credit of debts it already, lawfully, ran up.

31 / 100
Congress's Power of the Purse · averaged across all six features

The shape of this card is almost the inverse of most entries in this series. The one feature that runs through the courts — the clause’s exclusivity, tested and confirmed by Clinton v. City of New York — is the strongest score on the board. Everything that depends on Congress actually using its own power on its own schedule is where the design has come apart: no on-time regular order in nearly three decades, a permanent CR-and-omnibus workaround, three funding lapses in a single fiscal year including the longest shutdown in American history, and a debt ceiling that turns Congress’s own past decisions into a hostage. The one place the other branch tried to route around the clause directly — 2025’s impoundment fight — produced a Supreme Court that ruled both ways within seven months and never actually settled whether it’s legal.

The last word

Two things are true at once. The legal wall around Congress’s exclusive power to appropriate money is standing — no court has ever let a president cut appropriated spending unilaterally, and the one law Congress passed to make that explicit survived its only direct Supreme Court test. But a wall that’s never been breached from the outside says nothing about what’s happening on Congress’s own side of it. The twelve-bill, on-time, committee-by-committee process the modern appropriations system was built around effectively no longer exists — it hasn’t produced a clean fiscal year since 1997 — and in its place is a cycle of stopgaps, omnibus bills, and shutdowns that has now produced three separate funding lapses in twelve months. The power of the purse is still exclusively Congress’s. Congress just isn’t using it the way it was designed to.

Ubi non est lex, non est transgressio — where there is no law, there is no transgression. The law here has never been stronger on paper. The process that’s supposed to produce it, on schedule, has almost entirely broken down.

Sources & methodology: