DeSantis has plans
In an interview on Martha McCallum’s “The Story” on Fox News, McCallum asked, “Are you in favor of eliminating any agencies?” DeSantis responded that he would work with Congress to get rid of the Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, and the Internal Revenue Service. He followed up by saying that if Congress would not work with him toward that goal, he’d use those agencies to attack many of the policies they are foisting on the American people right now.
Will this help him or hurt him? Darned if I know.
This is an excellent idea, and it would be a very good start indeed! Homeland Security should also be abolished, the Department of (In)Justice severely reformed, and the FBI broken apart; there should also be very significant defunding of the Pentagon and of the not-so-intelligent and far too numerous “intelligence agencies”.
I have a DeSantis sign in my front yard, I have contributed, and I do not live in Florida.
More good news for DeSantis and America
“US conservative group led by billionaire Koch to spend big to beat Trump
The conservative U.S. political network led by billionaire Charles Koch has raised over $70 million to spend on political races, an official with the group said on Thursday, with a key goal of stopping former President Donald Trump from clinching the 2024 Republican nomination.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-conservative-group-led-by-billionaire-koch-to-spend-big-to-beat-trump/ar-AA1deaJ4
Never heard a Republican promise that before. Except for Reagan, Lamar Alexander, Bob Dole… hmm looks like Republicans have been promising this for decades and not actually doing it. Even Trump’s Education Secretary said the Department of Education should not exist, but it’s still there.
And of course George W. Bush embraced the Department of Education notoriously with No Child Left behind.
But hey, maybe DeSantis is the one Republican who will finally do it and not just say it.
Good thing Federal employees aren’t unionized. Oh wait. Well maybe their unions don’t donate money to Federal elections? Bummer.
Trump was a fine prez except for his tweets until he got COVID in 2020. I am not aware of any CNS effects of COVID, but he will be a GOP disaster and disaster for our Republic if he wins the nomination and lets the Dems run the show—forever. America is close to succumbing to a tyrannical Dem. Party. He is guaranteed to lose the election if nominated.
The conservative U.S. political network led by billionaire Charles Koch
LOL. He’s got our best interests at heart!
From Washington Post, November 13 2020:
Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch expressed hope that President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will roll back President Trump’s tariffs, restore protections for “Dreamers” and enact policing reform that addresses systemic racism.
“We certainly want to congratulate Biden and Harris for this historic win,” Koch said in a Zoom interview on Wednesday, even as most Republican lawmakers have yet to publicly acknowledge the electoral reality and the White House blocks the transition from moving ahead. “We’re going to be looking for common ground and things that we can work together on for as many issues as possible.”
Billionaires are not our friends.
Frederick-
Thanks for quoting American Pravda, a mouthpiece for its sole owner, Jeff Bezos..
If I believed DiSantis I would consider a vote for him. But I don’t, I just think he’s trying to rustle up some support now that he will ignore later. What I think of as the Lindsey Graham tactic. Or maybe Mitt Romney is closer.
No idea if it will help or hurt. But he’s clearly stretching long and hard to reach core voters. While I’d love to see Education, Energy and the IRS abolished (not sure about Commerce), it’s a bit far fetched.
we have less energy, fewer educated students, commerce is just a crony operation for favored firms, the irs are like the Roman tax collectors,
Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, and the Internal Revenue Service.
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The Department of Education can be readily sorted into pieces with some functions re-assigned to the Labor Department, some to the Federal Trade Commission or a new agency, some folded into a program of general revenue sharing, some (certain regulatory functions) cut immediately, and some services (student loans) wound down and liquidated over a period of years.
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The problem with the Department of Commerce (bar a stray component here or there) is that it’s a grab bag thrown together due to convention. Much the same is true of the Department of Energy. You need to reassign the components of these departments; you’re not going to find much that it would be sensible to eliminate entirely.
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‘Eliminating the IRS’ is just a gimmick. The IRS has a damaged institutional culture and far too much discretionary power, but much of that is derived from the content of federal tax law, which is far too complex and laden with carve-outs. Congress could fix that, but they cannot be bothered. A partial solution would be to create a Department of Revenue with about nine bureaux therein tasked with different sorts of levies, but you need to fix the law.
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There are scads of individual agencies one might eliminate or from which one might excise fragments and eliminate the remainder. The Department of Education would certainly be on the list, not these others. I wonder if this was dashed off in 20 minutes or emerged from his PR office. It’s a disappointment.
The Trump campaign attacked DeSantis for suggesting a consumption tax to replace the income tax. The ads implied that it would be an *additional* tax, never mentioning what it would replace.
This is a small taste of the kind of opposition that any proposal for comprehensive restructuring of the tax system would run into.
Never heard a Republican promise that before. Except for Reagan, Lamar Alexander, Bob Dole… hmm looks like Republicans have been promising this for decades and not actually doing it.
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Not anyone’s fault but the Republican congressional caucus (and, back in the 1980s, the “Conservative Democratic Forum”). During the period running from 1995 to 2007, the Republican House delegation averaged 226 in number. Usually enough business Republicans to prevent any reforms with majorities that narrow.
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I doubt you ever heard that from Lamar Alexander or Robert Dole.
DeSantis has substantively taken on Disney and UF New College, both very woke institutions.
Trump isn’t the only woke-buster going.
they haven’t done in 30 years, they probably won’t do it now,
you mean lamar! asa hutchinson 1.0
@cicero:Thanks for quoting American Pravda,
So am I the bad guy for quoting the Washington Post, or is Charles Koch the bad guy for pledging fealty to the Bidens and giving an interview to the Washington Post to publicly announce where his loyalties lie?
Billionaires are not your friends.
koch has teamed up with soros, for the quincy institute, I guess they chose the path of least resistance, since the witchhunt over walker and act 10
@Art Deco:Not anyone’s fault but the Republican congressional caucus
Pretty sure the President, on paper, heads those departments, and he should be able to at minimum not appoint Cabinet secretaries to them and furlough all the employees, if he really wanted to be serious that he was trying to abolish them but Congress just wasn’t helping….
And that wraps up another episode of “If Republican Politicians Were Serious Opposition”, thanks for watching.
One thing a serious Republican majority could do is pass a law that debars federal agencies and departmental secretariats from ever distributing ‘grants, subsidies, and contributions’ without express statutory authorization, then limit express authorization to ..
1. Bureau of International Organization Affairs, State Department
2. Defense Security Co-operation Agency, DoD
3. Federal Emergency Management Agency, DHS
4. Indian Health Service, HHS
5. Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, HHS
6. Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor
7. Veterans Benefits Administration, Veterans Affairs
8. Office of Personnel Management
9. Agency for International Development
10. Social Security Administration
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You can add companion legislation liquidating federal agencies not on this list which do little else but distribute grants. Some might have a small residue which is assigned elsewhere and some might be replaced with an elaboration on the Earned Income Tax Credit and with a general revenue sharing program.
I’m a DeS fan.
Q for our FL correspondents:
Has DeS eliminated any analogous state agencies in Florida during his time as Gov?
Talk is easy, and cheap. Attacking wokeness in word and deed is good. Actually decreasing the size of govt is better.
Pretty sure the President, on paper, heads those departments, and he should be able to at minimum not appoint Cabinet secretaries to them and furlough all the employees, if he really wanted to be serious that he was trying to abolish them but Congress just wasn’t helping…
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I don’t think that’s within the President’s lawful discretion, but you be you.
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I should note there are no departments whose functions are comprehensively inadvisable. The ones which come the closest are HUD and Education.
Billionaires are not your friends.
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Some are, some aren’t.
he has done as much personnel turnover as is practical in education and health and other agencies, the deep state is too entrenched to do that in dc, so you need to nuke them from orbit,
I am still neutral between Trump and DeSantis. I fear that 2024 is already lost by fraud. Conservative Tree House had a very interesting column about Jan 6.
What follows below is a brilliant analysis of the federal government motive to create a J6 crisis that permitted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to trigger an emergency session and avoid the 2020 election certification challenges.
Those congressional floor challenges, known and anticipated well in advance of the morning of January 6, 2021, would have formed a legal and constitutional basis for ‘standing’ in judicial challenges that would have eventually reached the Supreme Court. The certification during “emergency session” eliminated the problem for Washington DC.i
The “Emergency” shut down any challenge to the vote fraud.
@Art Deco:I don’t think that’s within the President’s lawful discretion
Kindly show me where the Constitution says the President must appoint someone to a Cabinet position. Trump was criticized for not doing this and relying on acting secretaries instead, but it was not illegal for him to do it. There’s a law about how long acting secretaries can hold those positions, but the time allowed is so long (from 210 to 630 days) as to not be a particularly meaningful check on the practice. Not just Trump either; under Obama, Rebecca Blank served as acting secretary of Commerce from 2012 to 2013.
As for furloughs, yes, the President and/or agencies can order furloughs and have done so many times.
As for furloughs, yes, the President and/or agencies can order furloughs and have done so many times.
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The President does not have the authority to, in effect, unilaterally annul the enabling legislation for federal agencies, nor does he have much authority to impound funds. The matter was subject to controversy in the federal courts during the Nixon administration and the Administration’s expansive claims to the authority to impound funds were rejected.
@Art Deco:The President does not have the authority to, in effect, unilaterally annul the enabling legislation for federal agencies, nor does he have much authority to impound funds.
I was talking about furloughs. The President and the agencies can and do order furloughs and that is not the same thing as impounding funds, annulling enabling legislation, or any of this other chaff you threw out. He just tells people not to come to work and that they won’t be paid. This is also something that practically any state governor can do too and has done many times.
All during the BHO junta the Koch brothers were worse than to all of the progressive and leftist establishment than The Great Orange Whale of the future, but Frederick’s memory is like that. Now Charles Koch has found fault with OMB’s proposed policies in regard to his own buisnesses. Astounding, a libertarian billionaire has his own business interests.
I don’t actually know any billionaires. Bezos, Gates, Soros, seem kind of sketchy. Are they as bad as Charles Koch? Frederick knows.
Sad, even libertarian billionaires are not your “friends.”
Frederick:
“Billionaires are not your friends.”
“As of May, Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.5 billion, putting the real estate developer at No. 1,232 on the magazine’s list of the world’s richest billionaire”
What are Trump’s plans beside bitching and moaning about how he was robbed in the election? His number one plan during the 2016 election was to build a border wall. Despite having a republican House and Senate in his first two years, he never completed it.
DeSantis knows how to use campaign money regardless of the source to defeat the Democrats. He is already building up a ground game. Something Trump never did. Trump was caught flat-footed in 2020 and 2022 thinking that you win elections by having rallies where his fans cheer him on.
That is still Trump’s strategy. Did not work in the last elections and it won’t work in 2024.
There was no Colonel of the 2nd Artillery from 1822 until 1832 when the Senate refused to confirm Monroe’s candidate. Don’t know why Adams didn’t appoint someone. Jackson did appoint.
DeSantis has plans … and so do his friends?
https://www.oann.com/newsroom/desantis-allegedly-gave-92m-in-covid-19-relief-funds-to-project-benefitting-his-top-donor/
DeSantis realizes he’s far behind and needs to stand out from the rest of the crowd. He’s resorting to getting specific on his plans where generalizations would normally serve him better. This is good in that we will all know what he intends to do. But it will open him up to criticism and distortions of the proposed policies.
I was talking about furloughs. The President and the agencies can and do order furloughs and that is not the same thing as impounding funds, annulling enabling legislation, or any of this other chaff you threw out. He just tells people not to come to work and that they won’t be paid. This is also something that practically any state governor can do too and has done many times.
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What you are proposing is not within his authority. You would do well to drop this fantasy.
Will Ron Des re-issue the EO authorizing swamp drainage?
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/31/929597578/a-huge-attack-critics-decry-trump-order-that-makes-firing-federal-workers-easier
Has he stated his plan for the Ukraine/Russia situation?
William:
You write: “DeSantis realizes he’s far behind and needs to stand out from the rest of the crowd.” I disagree. He is far behind Trump, as is everyone else. But he is far ahead of “the rest of the crowd” and already stands out.
DeSantis is a wonky guy whose usual m.o. is specific programs which he then implements. For example, voting reform in Florida.
cb:
Why are you posting 100% unsourced rumors here? “Allegedly” and “reportedly” according to no one.
@Art Deco:What you are proposing is not within his authority.
According to the US Office of Personnel Management, it’s called “administrative furlough”:
An administrative furlough is a planned event by an agency which is designed to absorb reductions necessitated by downsizing, reduced funding, lack of work, or any budget situation other than a lapse in appropriations.
Only some Presidential appointees are not subject to administrative furlough, but the President of course can dismiss them.
You would do well to drop this fantasy.
What’s fantastic would be that the agencies can order a furlough but that the President mysteriously has no power to order the agencies to order one. The process is that OMB makes recommendations to the agencies how to execute the furlough, and the President signs the order that actually makes it happen. It happened in 2013 under Obama and it happened under Trump.
Is there something in Federal law you can link to that would prove I was wrong? I’m at least offering sources, you’re just saying “nuh-uh”.
That’s not going to happen — it never happens — but at least Ron remembered the names of the departments he wanted to get rid of, unlike Rick Perry.
Nixon tried to “impound” funds Congress appropriated and not spend the money, but the courts didn’t allow him to do so. That would probably be the case if a president attempted to close up agencies on his own.
Nixon also offered a plan for reorganizing the cabinet departments. “The traditional Departments of State, Treasury, Defense, and Justice would remain intact, while the remaining agencies would be compounded into Human Resources, Community Development, Natural Resources, and Economic Development. ” It went nowhere.
What’s fantastic would be that the agencies can order a furlough but that the President mysteriously has no power to order the agencies to order one.
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The furloughs you are referring to are consequent of a deficit of funds to pay the employees. The President cannot, by law, impound the funds and then furlough the employees at his discretion. You just repeating yourself does not grant him that authority.
I think Art Deco is right about the limits of DeSantis’s plan. I’m sure there are things he can do without Congress, but those things are likely limited. That is, unless he intends to take a page from the book of the past two Democratic presidents and begin doing things that are blatantly illegal and dare the courts to stop him. Frankly, I hope that he is not. That playbook really doesn’t help the right. The next Democrat to take office will just reverse every EO on day one and pocket the precedent to use for leftist purposes.
There’s got to be some sort of statutory change that can get through reconciliation rules in the Senate, some sort of an APA-like statute that would empower the executive to constrain the administrative state. (The Democrats stretched the precedent on reconciliation nearly to the breaking point and arguably beyond in 2021 and 2022. There’s got to be some way to use that precedent.) Show me a Republican candidate who has a workable plan to make statutory changes and I’ll be impressed.
I’m also surprised that there has been so little mention of Rick Perry in this thread. I actually liked Rick Perry a lot in 2016. I think he should have stayed out in 2012, though. He clearly wasn’t ready after his back surgery. He would have been a better candidate in 2016 had he sat out 2012. He was an outsider, Texas A&M, (no Iveys), active duty military service, he was almost the anti-Bush. The country would be much better off today if the populist turn in the Republicn party had been led by someone like Perry instead of Trump. It’s also instructive to compare and contrast Democratic lawfare against Perry vs. Trump. Perry was indicted for fighting a corrupt, abusive Democrat prosecutor. Trump, so far, has been indicted for paying off a porn star and hoarding top secret documents. I’d rather have leaders more like Perry.
his proposal was in part why they impeached him,
if you don’t recall, there was a lawfare exercise against perry as well by Ronnie Earle, (see I remember all these injuries the dems have waged against the people,
why they protect the Clinton the Obamas the Corzines of the world,
rosenstein did the former, they didn’t even try to pretend as they have with svb,
Department of education should be eliminated completely.
I am not even sure they should be an advisory board that supplies thoughts on curriculum.
Most other agencies should sunset after 10-15 years.
If the function is still needed have it rebuilt with a minimum of 50% of new people.
Don’t allow people under 30 to work for the government.
Don’t hire people to work for the government that have not had a job with a for profit company for at least 5 consecutive years.
Military would be the only exception to the above.
trump could get elected, he chose perry as energy secretary and he was on the way to weening ukraine from dependence on Russia gas and oil, hence lawfare exercise no 1
yes but what will they do with all those education majors, they don’t know any valuable skills, they can employ,
I have seen to many games played with the law, see john deutsch general cartwright, general petraeus, to go omg Orange Man,
https://twitter.com/mrddmia/status/1674573080382013443
the previous congress in the pliostocene era, gave the president the line item veto, he managed to squander it, in all inconsidered court challenge,
Be advised: Twitter links are (as of this morning) once again inaccessible to non-Twitter-account-holding viewers.
@Art Deco:The furloughs you are referring to are consequent of a deficit of funds to pay the employees.
Kindly show me the citation that says that is the ONLY reason the President can furlough. “Nuh-uh” persuades no one. The citation I linked gives multiple reasons and lack of funds is one.
The President cannot, by law, impound the funds
I never said he could impound the funds. I said he could furlough.
and then furlough the employees at his discretion.
Kindly cite your source, a law has to be published somewhere.
You just repeating yourself does not grant him that authority.
I provided sources to support my view, you didn’t. If you comment further on this without a source I’ll just ignore, if you link to a source I’m open to changing my mind.
we could certainly try it, see if there are court challenges (sarc)
Most other agencies should sunset after 10-15 years. If the function is still needed have it rebuilt with a minimum of 50% of new people. Don’t allow people under 30 to work for the government. Don’t hire people to work for the government that have not had a job with a for profit company for at least 5 consecutive years.
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Sunset legislation was an idea of interest to members of Congress in the 1970s. John Anderson was a supporter. The utility of it is that you scrape off barnacles which would remain due to inertia. I’m not seeing why you’d fire half the staff of agencies you’d re-authorized. Like other interesting ideas from the era (see various ideas for the budget process), it’s a reasonable wager you would do some good, but you would only save small sums because disposable agencies are generally not lushly funded agencies. Obvious targets for Sunset would be the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, various retirement baubles (the scholarship funds named after outgoing members of Congress), the Community Relations Service of the Merrick-Garland-Stasi Department, the Elections Assistance Commission, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the Administration on Aging, the Office of Head Start, the National Institute on Food and Agriculture, the Small Business Administration, the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, and most every component of HUD except the office which regulates lead paint exposure.
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I can see imposing age ranges (or time-in-profession ranges) for elected officials, judges, and patronage employees. I can see the utility of rotation-in-office rules for these same sorts, judges excepted. I can see the utility of mandatory retirement rules for every kind of public employee. I’m not seeing the utility of requiring public employees in general to be at least 30 years of age. IMO, what we need to do is have impersonal recruitment and promotion screens in re the paper-and-pencil examination is the exclusive instrument for some positions and an important component for others. After that, we don’t need to nail their feet to the floor. If three persons in an employee’s chain of command countersign a letter of dismissal, that should suffice to unload the employee. If, in post-termination reviews, the employee and his counsel can demonstrate he was dismissed for one of 6 or 7 impermissible reasons, he can be indemnified and an ombudsman can begin proceedings against his guilty supervisors (who, if found liable, would be terminated and debarred from public employment for a term of years). As long as recruitment and promotion are done according to spec (i.e. regulated by examinations), we don’t need to nail public employees; feet to the floor to promote professionalism (IMO).
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I’m not seeing why we would debar someone from taking a civil service examination if they hadn’t provided proof of employment by a commercial company for a minimum of five years (FTE). That seems gratuitous as well. IMO, the real problem in public employment generally is (1) opaque compensation schemes, (2) compensation schemes which allow public- employees-in-general a take home pay exceeding their private sector counterparts on average (in spite of weak discipline and overstaffing), (3) collective bargaining for public employees, (4) weak discipline, and (5) social patronage in the form of racial-preference schemes &c. Political gamesmanship in public bureaucracies I suspect is something you see among professional-managerial employees and in schools, not among rank-and-file employees.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think that a President can’t just unilaterally furlough all the employees of an entire federal agency without justifiable cause. And said cause would have to be something fairly specific like lack of funds due to a government shutdown due to a failure to enact funding legislation. I don’t believe that a president can enact such a furlough on a whim. He’s not a feudal monarch… yet.
source
@nonapod:lack of work or funds or other nondisciplinary reasons.
“Other non-disciplinary reasons” covers a lot of ground, and does not exclude what I proposed. But thanks for citing something.
I checked the entire text of that law you cited and it does not have any specifics as to when a furlough can be ordered.
Can’t wait until the PhD physicist goes to court and represents himself instead of using an actual lawyer. What could conceivably go agley?
To those trying to stretch statutory language in favor of presidential authority – you’re going to run right into the major questions doctrine, including the student loan case from today.
Most of these laws that restrict the President are unconstitutional, regardless of what the idiot court rules. Congress appropriates money and ALLOWS the Executive to spend it. The Executive can refuse to spend it. This is not normally a problem. Congress can coerce the Executive by refusing to fund something else or withholding confirmations and the like. This is how it worked in the past.
Until the USSC stuck their thumb on the scale.
I guess people seem to be big fans of interpretations that expand executive branch power around here?
Nonapad:
Not sure what you’re referring to.
First of all, this is what DeSantis said: “He followed up by saying that if Congress would not work with him toward that goal, he’d use those agencies to attack many of the policies they are foisting on the American people right now.”
So, he hopes that Congress would cooperate (I have my doubts that it would, though, even if controlled by the GOP). But if Congress didn’t cooperate in getting rid of the agencies, a president certainly would be empowered to help change the focus and direction of agencies that are established as part of a president’s Cabinet. Plus, the entire thrust of the proposal is to contract the power of these Cabinet-level agencies rather than expand them.
@Nanopod:I guess people seem to be big fans of interpretations that expand executive branch power around here?
We don’t believe that Federal agencies that report to the President are independent fiefdoms with their own ability to decide what work they do, how they do it, and who works there, if that’s what you mean. That’s the Deep State theory, where they decide what orders from the President they will follow. Nobody else in those agencies is elected, so from whom do they take direction?
Instead, we believe that “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”, which you will find in your Constitution as the first sentence of Article II.
And so if you can show me a law passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by a President that says furloughs can only be ordered in such and such cases, show it to me, and if it’s not there, well “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
The whole point of that, according to Federalist 70 anyway, is so that the accountability for what the Executive does is located in a single human being who can be held responsible. Agencies that get to do what they want to do contradicts that.
…one of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive, and which lies as much against the last as the first plan, is, that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility. Responsibility is of two kinds to censure and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author. The circumstances which may have led to any national miscarriage or misfortune are sometimes so complicated that, where there are a number of actors who may have had different degrees and kinds of agency, though we may clearly see upon the whole that there has been mismanagement, yet it may be impracticable to pronounce to whose account the evil which may have been incurred is truly chargeable.
tl; dr the point of having a President is to say “the buck stops here”. Yes he’s supposed see to it that the laws are carried out, so, show me the law. There is no law that hires people, fires people, puts employees on the schedule or assigns them work, or tells them not to come in for three days. That’s done by the humans who work for the agencies and the agencies report to and take direction from the President.
The Executive can refuse to spend it.
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Again, you are misinformed on this point.
That’s good. I don’t believe that either.
I haven’t deeply researched but I doubt there is such a law. The only references I can find regarding furloughs appear to not explicately restrict a president from furloughing for “other reasons”, so strictly speaking I suppose a president could attempt to furlough a bunch of Federal workers for any reason he or she pleases. I also assume such an action would be immediately be legally challenged by the opposition party.
I apologize for not being more clear in my post there. I wasn’t referring to any of DeSantis’s ideas or plans, just the arguments that have been made upthread regarding whether or not a President can just furlough federal workers for any reason or not. So far the limits of executive power in this specific case seem to at least a little open to interpretation.
I personally am not overly enthusiastic about expanding executive power, hence I would prefer a more narrow interpretation of the rules and requirements for a president to furlough federal workers. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with DeSantis’s ideas here. In fact I wholeheartedly agree with them.
Sadly I think Trump will get the nomination (and get slaughtered in the general election) but if DeSantis wins he will need a strong GOP Senate and House and also have the intestinal fortitude for the avalanche of media trashing that he will receive.
The Executive can refuse to spend it.
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Again, you are misinformed on this point.
Again, so are you.
there hasn’t been a recent case, where such authority was challenged, one might argue the transfer of defense department funds by trump, to build the wall was adjacent to same,
Not sure what you’re referring to.
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Well, two people on this thread have argued that the President can unilaterally shut down a federal agency and impound the funds appropriated to run it.
It would be great if he could do it.