Roberts Memo Could Complicate Trump's Spending Freeze [View all]

As a constitutional crisis seems headed to the Supreme Court, documents show the chief justice declared that a president has no authority to block required spending.

National Politics
Jan 28, 2025

In a 1985 memo to the White House’s top lawyer, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that a president may not block congressionally required spending — a declaration on a major legal question that now seems destined to move from the Trump White House to Roberts’ Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s administration issued an order declaring that “all agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.” The directive — which sowed chaos throughout the country’s Medicaid and Head Start programs — was temporarily stayed by a federal judge. But the dispute over spending authority has created a constitutional crisis that is likely to be appealed up to the high court.

Roberts already outlined his views on such powers during his tenure in President Ronald Reagan’s White House Counsel’s Office.

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In that memo, Roberts declared that “the question of whether the president has such authority (to block congressionally mandated spending) is not free from doubt, but I think it clear that he has none in normal situations.”
https://www.levernews.com/roberts-memo-could-complicate-trumps-spending-freeze/