Line-Item Veto Would Be a More Enduring Tool With Which To Cut Waste Than Trump’s Government Efficiency Department
Presidents of both parties have since before the Civil War sought a line-item veto to enable them to end individual parts of a spending bill without rejecting the entire thing.
President Trump is appointing two businessmen, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. Its goal is to cut wasteful spending. Rather than adding a new bureaucracy to shrink the existing one, though, why not go for a line-item veto as the more constitutionally logical solution — one that would ensure that the goal of fiscal responsibility endures long after Trump’s term expires.
A statement by the Trump-Vance Transition team stated on Tuesday that Messers. Musk and Ramaswamy will “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.” Their goal is to “drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout” the $6.5 trillion, or so, that the federal government is spending a year.
The statement said that the new department aims to “make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘We the people.’” However, their “work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026,” the 250th anniversary of American independence. It’s a lofty goal, but whatever they accomplish can be undone by subsequent administrations and congresses absent a permanent tool to curtail future expansion.
Presidents of both parties have sought a line-item veto since before the Civil War, enabling them to kill individual parts of a spending bill without rejecting the entire thing. It would empower chief executives to eliminate regulations and wasteful spending, such as earmarks individual members of Congress add to legislation, which contribute to the expanding federal government and national debt.
“The natural progress of things,” President Jefferson said, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” To combat this trend, 44 states — all except Indiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont — give their governors some form of a line-item veto. It also helps them obey laws requiring balanced budgets, which all states have except Vermont.
In January of 1938, the Senate Appropriations Committee denied President Franklin Roosevelt’s request for an “item veto” after the House of Representatives approved it. The senate then added over $1.4 million — $32 million today — to the appropriations bill that passed the House, demonstrating the scope of spending the president might have restrained.
In his 1984 State of the Union address, President Reagan asked for a line-item veto, too. “I’ll make the cut,” he said. “I’ll take the heat.” In 1995, President Clinton made the same pitch in his State of the Union. The Republican-controlled Congress, elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility similar to Trump’s, agreed and passed the Line-Item Veto Act of 1996 to kill “pork barrel spending.”
Mr. Clinton used the line-item veto to slash 82 items from the budget. That amounted to $1.2 billion in federal spending while Congress overrode vetoes — by super majorities of two-thirds — that would have saved $287 million more. These were small bits of the $1.6 trillion total budget, but as Senator Everett Dirkson said, “a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking real money.”
In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled six to three in Clinton v. City of New York that the new law was unconstitutional. “Writing for the majority,” the Wall Street Journal reported, Justice John Paul Stevens all but apologized.” He wrote that although “the court realized that the Line-Item Veto Act was ‘the product of much debate and deliberation’ in Congress,” the Nine “concluded that our duty is clear.”
The majority found that the line-item veto violated the Presentment Clause of the Constitution, which requires a president to either sign or veto bills and resolutions passed by Congress in their entirety. Mr. Clinton described the ruling as “a defeat for all Americans,” one that denied presidents “a valuable tool for eliminating waste in the federal government.”
The Great Scalia, in his dissent, wrote that he found “the president’s cancellation of spending items to be entirely in accord with the Constitution,” meaning he was within his rights not to spend money Congress had authorized. President George W. Bush asked Congress to pass a new line-item veto in line with the high court’s ruling, but the Legislative Line-Item Veto Act of 2006 failed to garner enough support.
The new Congress can try writing legislation that survives a court challenge or propose a constitutional amendment to get the job done. Trump could pursue both paths at once and — likely with support from former presidents of both parties — ensure that his goal of cutting wasteful spending and bureaucracy endures long after the Department of Government Efficiency concludes its mission.
https://www.nysun.com/article/line-item-veto-would-be-a-more-enduring-tool-with-which-to-cut-waste-than-trumps-government-efficiency-department
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