The Office of Management and Budget has taken the unprecedented step of directing the Department of Transportation to ignore a legal opinion by the allegedly nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that declared ending Biden and Buttigieg's electric vehicle charging station boondoggle illegal. If the GAO moves to enforce its opinion in court, this will tee up a major fight over the authority of the president to control spending and the legality of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
In a letter to Secretary of Transportation Scott Duffy, the general counsel of OMB characterized the GAO report on funding electric vehicle charging stations funded under the $5 billion cash vacuum that was the 2021 $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program as “wrong and legally indefensible.”
The controversy centers around an Inauguration Day memo signed by President Trump halting the farcical Biden-Buttigieg plan to build a network of electric vehicle charging stations to go along with their efforts to restrict ownership and usage of real cars. In three years, the wildly inept Biden administration managed to parlay $7.5 billion into eight charging stations.
RELATED:
Joe Biden's Electric Vehicle Charging Station Boondoggle Gets the Baby Seal Treatment – RedState
This prompted outrage by various grifters, and 16 Democrat Attorneys General filed a lawsuit on May 6, alleging that the administration had no right to deprive their states of the baksheesh promised by Joe Biden, or whoever was handing out promises on his behalf when taxpayer money was doled out.
From the timing of the GAO report, it seems obvious that the sole reason for the report was to provide underpinning for the Democrat lawsuit, which is something you totally expect a nonpartisan agency to do. In fact, the OMB calls out GAO for a finding that seems calculated to scuttle President Trump's efforts to shape national energy policy.
The [OMB General Counsel Mark] Paoletta letter called the report “part of a troubling trend of partisan opinions” by the GAO.
“Your agency, and all Executive Branch agencies, should not feel compelled to cooperate at all with GAO in its efforts to thwart President Trump’s agenda, nor give any weight or deference to GAO’s opinions,” he wrote.
Where this goes is anyone's guess. The lawsuit by the Democrat Attorneys General seems a bizarre claim to entitlement. Likewise, the GAO opinion ignores the law it claims to enforce, as the Trump administration has not refused to spend the funds, but is reexamining how those funds are used. In a sane world, the Democrat lawsuit would fail for lack of standing, as no one is entitled to federal funds. Even though no one was found to have requisite standing to challenge the 2020 election results in court, we're seeing a new legal philosophy in play under President Trump where anyone has standing to challenge any act by the administration.
Ultimately, I think the Supreme Court will have to rule on the legality of the Impoundment Control Act. This was enacted by a hostile Democrat Congress against the efforts of a Watergate-damaged Richard Nixon to stop spending on stupid stuff to bring inflation under control (some of this should sound familiar). It was one of at least two pieces of legislation intended to make the president into a servile butler rather than the Chief Executive. The other piece is the, in my opinion, facially unconstitutional War Powers Act. There is a large amount of evidence that, previous to the Impoundment Control Act, presidents treated Congressional appropriations as a ceiling that could not be exceeded, rather than a mandatory number to be achieved. The former makes sense if the president controls the executive branch; the latter only makes sense if the president's only function is to do as he's ordered. As we're seeing with the struggle in Congress to cut spending, the only way to control the budget is for presidents to have the right to refuse to spend.
The administration is on course to bring all "independent" agencies under the control of the White House.
RELATED:
Trump Declares War on the Administrative State – RedState
Winning: SCOTUS Settles Legal Showdown Over Trump Firing NLRB and MSPB Appointees – RedState
It will push the envelope until the impoundment issue reaches the Supreme Court, and I think it will win.
RedState is your leading source for news and views on administration, politics, culture, and conservatism. If you like our reporting and commentary, please become a member and support our efforts. Use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.