America’s constitutional crisis could come to a head in four months

Support independent journalism that matters — become a Vox Member today. Just over two weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump has already thrown American democracy into crisis. On his first day in office, the president pardoned those who had violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a bid to obstruct his removal from power. He then fired more than a dozen federal prosecutors who had brought charges against the January 6 rioters — a pair of moves that signal that the federal government will not necessarily punish Americans who perpetrate political violence in the president’s name. The administration has also coerced corporations into giving Trump money and other concessions, through tactic threats of regulatory scrutiny. Its Federal Communications Commission has pressured CBS News into giving regulators an unabridged version of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, as though the government has a right to veto the editing practices of independent news networks. But Trump’s starkest assault on democratic norms is his usurpation of Congress’s authority over spending. The separation of powers is a fundamental feature of our constitutional order: The people’s legislative representatives determine what the government will spend money on and the president administers that spending. Upon taking power, the Trump administration has commandeered Congress’s prerogatives. Trump paused the disbursement of trillions of dollars in congressionally authorized spending. Faced with a court order to halt this spending freeze, the administration backed down only partially. The White House rescinded a memo that had ordered a sweeping pause in federal grants but insisted that “the federal funding freeze” was still in place — and continued blocking spending on green energy, foreign aid, and other programs it does not like. This assault on the separation of powers was not an impulsive aberration. Rather, Trump and his nominee to lead the White House budget office, Russel Vought, have argued for years that the president should have the authority to withhold congressional appropriations that he opposes. Meanwhile, the president’s top donor, Elon Musk, has claimed the authority to place civil servants on administrative leave, in a seemingly illegal violation of congressionally mandated civil service protections. More gravely, Musk and Trump shuttered the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent agency codified by Congress in 1998. The executive branch does not have the authority to dissolve federal agencies that it does not like without an act of Congress. Musk has also secured access to the Treasury Department systems that distribute trillions in federal payments and has suggested that his team would be justified in blocking spending that it deems suspect. This constitutes a democratic emergency in and of itself. But the Trump administration’s power grab also threatens to exacerbate another impending crisis: the fight over raising America’s debt limit. In fact, the interaction between these two crises could not only jeopardize America’s economic stability, but provide Trump with a golden opportunity to further consolidate power. If Congress can’t trust the president to honor its appropriations, it probably can’t raise the debt limit In most political systems, when lawmakers order more spending than they offset through taxes, the Treasury borrows whatever funding is necessary to execute their will. In the US, however, we have added a bizarre and hazardous extra step to this process: If Congress’s laws require the Treasury to borrow money in excess of a certain statutory limit, then the House and Senate must take an additional vote raising that limit (which is commonly called the “debt ceiling”). This is a deeply dysfunctional institution. Congress perennially struggles to raise the debt ceiling because “your representative voted to increase America’s borrowing limit to over $31 trillion” sounds bad in campaign advertisements. Were Congress to actually fail to raise the debt limit, however, it would put the executive branch in an impossible position: The president would either need to nullify duly authorized spending or ignore the debt limit law. In practice, it is widely believed that a sustained debt ceiling breach would force the Treasury Department to default on America’s debt payments, a development that would likely trigger an economic crisis. Federal borrowing exceeded the debt limit at the start of this year, but the Treasury Department can delay a breach for a few months through various extraordinary measures. But if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling by sometime in the late spring or early summer — the exact timing is not yet clear — then the government will default on its obligations. There is (almost certainly) no way for congressional Republicans to raise the debt ceiling without Democratic cooperation. This is because the House GOP has a mere five-seat majority, the smallest in modern history. And many House Republicans are unwilling to vote for a debt limit increase, unless it is paired with politically toxic cuts to government spending. Already, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled that he will work with Democrats on legislation raising the debt limit, a tacit admission that his party cannot do this on its own. House Democrats, meanwhile, recognize that the debt limit provides a rare source of leverage over the unified GOP government. And they plan to withhold support on an increase unless Republicans agree to fund various Democratic priorities and reverse some of Trump’s executive orders. Yet the Trump administration’s refusal to honor congressionally authorized spending threatens to make such a bipartisan agreement impossible. After all, if the Republican president is not actually bound by congressional appropriations — and can simply refuse to administer spending on Democratic priorities — then there is no basis for bipartisan dealmaking: House Republicans cannot make any credible concessions to their Democratic counterparts. How a debt ceiling crisis could turn into a constitutional one This is dangerous for its immediate implications: A debt ceiling breach would have damaging economic consequences. But a congressional stalemate over the debt limit could also provide the Trump administration with an opportunity to further aggrandize and legitimate its usurpation of Congress’s spending power. An administration eager to make unilateral cuts to the federal budget could exploit such a crisis to do precisely that: Incapable of executing all appropriations, the administration could choose to continue spending on defense, border control, and other Republican priorities while throttling spending on the safety net. Such triage might initially be framed as an emergency measure. Yet Congress’s failure to uphold one of its most basic fiscal responsibilities — preventing the government from defaulting on its obligations — would give Trump an opening to legitimize his radical theories about the president’s spending powers: If the legislature cannot restrain its appetite for spending enough to keep federal borrowing within its own prescribed limits, then perhaps America needs a strong leader to take responsibility for curbing outlays away from a hapless Congress. It’s worth emphasizing that this scenario is entirely hypothetical. And I think it is much more likely than not that we avoid it. Between today and the exhaustion of America’s borrowing capacity, the judiciary might decisively rebuke the Trump administration’s infringements on congressional authority (although it is not entirely clear that the president would comply with such a ruling). Or else, the White House may scale back its unconstitutional activities, and Democrats might therefore regain faith that the terms of a debt ceiling deal would be honored. But Trump’s first two weeks in office have given us cause for contemplating worst-case scenarios. I’ve been covering Trump’s affronts to liberal democratic norms for nearly a decade now. And I failed to anticipate that he might empower an unaccountable megabillionaire to order the lawless dissolution of independent federal agencies, sideline every civil servant who refuses to comply with his orders, and meddle in Treasury Department payment systems. As the Trump administration turns the unthinkable into the actual on a daily basis, it’s reasonable to consider possibilities that had previously appeared too far-fetched and menacing to scrutinize (or prepare for). The prospect that a debt limit crisis may trigger a constitutional breakdown is one such hypothetical.

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America’s constitutional crisis could come to a head in four months