February 2, 2025

Today, I want to take time to break down the Impoundment Act, because this is important stuff — and I feel it’s either being:

a. Completely ignored by mainstream media, or

b. Written about in overly complicated language that scares off readers who just want to understand the basics.

Naturally, this led me down a rabbit hole and I felt the need to draw a big circle around the whole situation, linking the Impoundment Act to the unwritten agenda of the Trump administration. I do hope you’ll stick around for the kicker, because I provide a lot of sources and it’s not just masturbatory liberalism, I assure you.

With that said, let me explain why the Impoundment Act is worth understanding. It comes down to the most important phrase to NEVER appear in the U.S. Constitution: “checks and balances”.

A Quick Refresher on Checks and Balances

Anyone who made it to sixth grade has heard of checks and balances, and probably has a decent idea of what it means. Here’s a refresher just in case.

In the early years of the United States, the Founding Fathers set out to draft the first fully codified national constitution, building upon earlier democratic models like the English Magna Carta and the Mayflower Compact. Unlike its predecessors, however, the U.S. Constitution was designed to be a comprehensive document that would define a large-scale, modern representative democracy.

Almost immediately, problems arose. A group called the Anti-Federalists — which included Samuel Adams and even Thomas Jefferson (though he was less committed to the cause than others) — feared the proposed Constitution gave too much power to the central government, weakening the authority of individual states.

The Federalists, on the other hand, argued that a strong central government was necessary for the new democracy to function. Three of the most vocal proponents — Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison — set out to prove their position through a series of essays now known as The Federalist Papers. This is where we first get the phrase "checks and balances," credited to James Madison, who famously wrote: "You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

Madison believed that government must impose limits on its own power to prevent tyranny. This was accomplished by dividing the central government into three branches:

• Executive (President)

• Legislative (Congress)

• Judicial (Supreme Court)

Each branch was given specific powers over the others, including but not limited to:

• Congress (Legislative Branch) makes the laws, but the President (Executive Branch) can veto them.

• Congress can override a presidential veto with a two-thirds majority in both houses.

• The Supreme Court (Judicial Branch) can declare executive actions unconstitutional.

• The President appoints Supreme Court justices, but the Senate must approve them.

• And so on…

Madison warned that concentrating power in any one branch was the very definition of tyranny. This fear of unchecked power is what led the states to accept a centralized government and the Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788.

Enter: The Impoundment Act

Fast forward almost 200 years to the early 1970s, when President Nixon unilaterally pulled funding for programs that had been approved by Congress (sound familiar? Because that’s exactly what Trump tried to do AGAIN last week knowing full well it was illegal). This was a direct violation of Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the “power of the purse” — meaning that it controls all government spending.

Nixon’s actions created an immediate constitutional crisis, and in response, Congress passed the 1974 Impoundment Act to reassert its authority over federal spending. This law established clear rules the Executive Branch must follow:

• Presidents must spend all congressionally approved funds unless Congress agrees to rescind them.

• If the president wants to withhold or delay funds, he must send a formal request to Congress.

• Congress has 45 days to approve or reject the request. If Congress takes no action, the funds must be spent as originally allocated.

Trump vs. the Impoundment Act

Now, over 40 years later, we have another president attempting to steal Congress’s "power of the purse." It should surprise no one that Trump attempted to pull funding from domestic programs last week — as this was spelled out explicitly in Project 2025.

But even if you’re still deluding yourself into thinking Project 2025 isn’t Trump’s agenda, his administration also made it clear from the beginning they intend to challenge the Impoundment Act’s constitutionality. This is explicitly bullet-pointed in Trump’s "Agenda 47" campaign manifesto where Trump himself appears in a video, posted in June 2023, discussing his plan to disembowel the Impoundment Act: Trump/Vance Website with all this stuff in black and white (and red, white, and blue).

So now we know without a doubt that Trump intends to challenge the law that sought to clarify and codify a major check on the Executive Branch. Why would he do that?

The Deep State Boogeyman

First let’s establish that there’s almost always a huge disconnect between what Trump says and what he means, so whenever Trump speaks, we should be looking for the ulterior motive.

In this case, he says he is challenging the Impoundment Act as part of his efforts to go after the “Deep State,” a scary sounding name for a boogeyman that doesn’t actually exist, popularized by conspiracy theorists, most notably the organization known as Qanon. And as much as I know mainstream Republicans are prone to dismiss any connection between President Trump and Qanon, one of the core philosophies of the movement is something called the “Great Awakening” or the “Storm” by which there is a massive purge of federal employees. If you’ve been paying attention since January 20^th, you know that’s exactly what’s going on in our government right now. The storm is upon us.

Like I said, however, the Deep State doesn’t exist. Anyone who has ever been involved in project management can tell you that it’s hard enough to get a large group of known individuals to work in tandem. It’d be near impossible to get a secret cabal of shadowy figures embedded in the government to coordinate on an agenda. There is no Mr. Burns and the Stonecutters pulling the strings in the background. Our government is so, so, so, so much more complicated than that.

Homer Simpson is inducted into the secret and powerful society of the Stonecutters.

Alas, humans like tangible foes, and so authoritarians are keen to make up boogeymen for them. For Hitler, there was the “Invisible Hand”, a network of bureaucrats, academics, journalists, and financial elites who were allegedly working against the German people. Once again…sound familiar?

That’s because it’s textbook fascism.

In his essay “The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand: Anonymous Market Mechanisms and Dark Powers”, Jakob Tanner writes: “A systematic ‘behind-ism’ in the construction of conspiratorial plots always involves the same operation of making the invisible visible. Tearing the real powers out of the dark realm in which they try to conceal their capacity to control and manipulate a group, a country, or the whole world: this is the unfailing promise.”

The idea is that by identifying the boogeyman, the autocrat can then paint himself as the hero – the Beowulf to the Grendel. Hercules to the Hydra. Good versus evil. This is a theme that resonates with our base need for story, something we understand intrinsically.

In short, we eat this shit up.

And this is how authoritarians seize power; they create a villain and give it a name – the Deep State, the Invisible Hand, or even the Cathedral (as we’ll see below) – then then they use that foe as an excuse to dismantle a democracy’s checks and balances from within. Hitler did it with the Enabling Act of 1933. Trump is doing it by going after the Impoundment Act of 1974 - the law that keeps him from being the one in charge of the money. Because as Otto van Bismark said in his speech to the German parliament in 1869, "He who has his thumb on the purse has the power." Which is to say, the person in charge of the money is in charge of everything.

That’s what Trump wants – absolute power. Not to dismantle the Deep State, but to dismantle the checks and balances that keep his branch, the Executive Branch, from being the final authority. It should terrify everyone in America, and, frankly, the world that this is Trump’s aim, but unfortunately, too many of us are still high on the Kool-Aid, so I’ll leave you with this one last thought.

The "CEO-King" and Trump’s Real Endgame

It comes down to a guy you’ve probably never heard of — Curtis Yarvin. He’s a software engineer turned political theorist on the West Coast who went from being a sort of fringe-lunatic blogger to a mainstream contributor over the last few years.

And when I say he’s mainstream, I mean MAINSTREAM. Just two weeks ago, he was interviewed by the New York Times where they discussed a number of his theories, most notably his sincere belief that democracy in America is a failed institution and it’s time to convert our country to a sort of authoritarian CEO-like model that would, essentially, be a monarchy. He even goes so far as to call this monarch the “CEO-King”.

Not surprisingly, Yarvin is outspoken about the looming threat of the “Deep State”, though he calls it “the Cathedral”. And, you know what? As a fantasy fiction writer, I’ve got to hand it to him, because that is actually a scarier name for a boogeyman than “Deep State”, which has always sounded a little too much like “Deep Throat” (the mysterious character who took down Nixon) for my taste. Much of what comes out of Yarvin sounds like it’s pulled right out of a dystopian novel, in fact. And if he took the time to write it, I may read that book, if not for the very disconcerting fact that his ideas are catching like wildfire.

In particular, they are gaining momentum in the tech world. Notably with Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and ex-PayPal CEO who sinks millions in the campaigns of far-right candidates. Thiel spent one million on Trump’s first presidential run, though he chose to forgo direct funding of the last two and instead focus on being a fundraiser for the President. In addition to sharing political views with Yarvin, he’s also a financial backer of Yarvin’s projects, and the two have been linked together in more ways than I have time to go into here, but I highly suggest this Vanity Fair article if you’d like to read more.

What’s significant about the connection between Yarvin and Thiel, however, is that Thiel is responsible for handpicking Vance as Trump’s running mate. And not surprisingly, it turns out that Curtis Yarvin has been highly influential on how Vance views the state of democracy in America. He’s even gone so far to say publicly that he likes the theories Yarvin is putting out about turning America into an autocracy.

In 2021 podcast interview covered in depth by Rachel Maddow last October, Vance said openly: “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things. One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself…The task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved and then when the inevitable collapse comes you build back the country in a way that’s actually better.”

IN A WAY THAT’S ACTUALLY BETTER THAN THE CONSTITUTION?

For these people, “better” means doing away with the checks and balances built into the very fabric of American democracy and moving toward a CEO-style monarchy.

There’s a reason why the titans of tech sat in front of Trump’s cabinet members at the inauguration, folks. This isn’t a theory. This is happening right now. The tech elite, the billionaire donors, and the Project 2025 architects are not interested in preserving the Constitution or America as we know it — they are actively working to replace it.

And that should terrify everyone.

More about Yarvin and how his truly sick theories are influencing and shaping the current administration here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump