Posted on 01/02/2020 5:28:44 PM PST by ctdonath2
[snip]
Sept. 1, 2019 - Sondland tells a top Zelensky aide, Andriy Yermak, that U.S. assistance is unlikely to flow until Ukraine provided the desired public statement, according to Sondland. Yermak disputes hearing this, however.
Early September 2019 - Zelensky makes an appointment to appear on CNN, where he plans to make the desired statement.
Sept. 10 - House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., demands to see the whistleblower complaint.
Sept. 11 - OMB releases the Ukraine aid.
Sept. 18 or 19 - Zelensky cancels his CNN interview.
Sept. 30, 2019 - The deadline for all 2019 federal spending, by which time all the Ukraine aid was supposed to be disbursed, or it would be automatically cancelled. Ultimately, $35 million was not spent in time but the deadline was extended in new legislation passed Sept. 19.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at publicintegrity.org ...
The law in question: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/682
Here is the part I am not too certain of the details on, since it happens above my level: If Congress is doing its job and managing funds per the schedule dictated by regulation, it uses the President’s budget as a guide to appropriate and allocate funds to the various executive agencies. In turn, they allocate the funds downwards to where they are spent. In this case, the spending agency would be the President. Funds *should* be allocated at the beginning of the fiscal year, in October. (This is a joke. Congress usually does not do its job and this year, they have been particularly egregious by shampeaching the President for enacting policy in a way they did not approve, i.e. “Orange man bad.”)
Here is the part where I am most familiar. At my level, where the spending occurs, we know that we have a certain budget to work with; we have to present our budget to the agency allocating funds to us before we receive any funds. So once we receive the funds, we take the first step by obligating them. This is when we order supplies, equipment, and so forth. The next step is to commit the funds—our orders are sent to the companies providing the goods. After commitment, the company fills the order and submits an invoice. Once we sign the invoice, the funds are expended. The last step is disbursement, when the company receives the money that they invoiced us for. In reality, the last two steps happen so close together because of electronic transfers that expenditure and disbursement are rarely tracked separately. In the old days, the expenditure would have been sending a check, and disbursement when the check was cashed.
The Sept 30 deadline for using funds applies to the obligation step. The expending and disbursement of funds can happen up to 5 years later (IIRC), although, in practice, we contact companies if they have not submitted invoices in a timely manner and try to get them to submit the invoice. The President made the deadline.
We not only have to obligate all current fiscal year funds by Sept. 30, we have a schedule to obligate funds throughout the fiscal year. Thus, we must obligate X percent of our funds by Y month. Our task is a bit more complicated, since some funds are 1 year and some are 2 year funds, meaning that the spending schedule is slightly different depending on the fund. The task becomes even more complicated when Congress does not do its job and the funds arrive late. From Oct 1 until we receive the funds, we have to operate on a barebones budget, meaning we can’t do the work we are supposed to do. And once we receive the funds, we are immediately responsible for not only obligating them, but for obligating them on the same schedule as if we had received them on Oct 1. So, if we are supposed to have obligated 80% of our funds by July 31, and we receive them Aug 1, we have to scramble to obligate 80% of our funds even though we just received them. Oh, and we get in trouble if we don’t use all of our funds in a fiscal year.
As you might guess, working within the federal budget system is stressful, difficult, and wasteful.
Anyway, I hope this has not muddied the waters too much for you.
From the inception of the Union until 1974, the President had the power to ‘spend’ allocated funds and the power to ‘impound’ funds he didn’t want immediately spent. In the hysteria surrounding Nixon’s impeachment as a means to curtail presidential power, the Impoundment Control Act was passed, limiting the presidential power and establishing the Budget Committees in both houses, as well as the Congressional Budget Office. But even with the ‘control act’ Trump was still acting within the law - which allocates him a 45-day window. Whether the ICA was constitutional in the first place is another story, and maybe it’s time to address that issue.
More:
“Put simply, if the President wants to spend less money than Congress provided for a particular purpose, he or she must first secure a law providing Congressional approval to rescind the funding in question. The ICA requires that the President send a special message to Congress identifying the amount of the proposed rescission; the reasons for it; and the budgetary, economic, and programmatic effects of the rescission. Upon transmission of such special message, the President may withhold certain funding in the affected accounts for up to 45 legislative session days. If a law approving the rescission is not enacted within the 45 days, any withheld funds must be made available for obligation.”
https://budget.house.gov/publications/report/impoundment-control-act-1974-what-it-why-does-it-matter
and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_funds
“Last year, GAO asked OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta for his views on that question, and he submitted them in Nov. 2018, stating, “the text of Impoundment Control Act clearly allows the President to propose and withhold funds at any time in a fiscal year. In addition to the unambiguous statutory language, there is bipartisan historical precedent for the President to withhold funds at any time of the fiscal year, including in instances where funds proposed for rescission have lapsed prior to the expiration of the 45-day withholding period.”
Nonetheless, in Dec. 2018, GAO came back with an opinion saying that the withholding period could not carry into the expiration of the funds: “we conclude that the ICA does not permit the withholding of funds through their date of expiration. “
http://sonorannews.com/2019/11/11/the-president-has-authority-to-withhold-appropriated-funds/
Just wait until something gets lost and you have to do a FLIPL. Those are no fun at all.
Lies
Now with Ukraine, we're to believe that the President does not have discretion to refuse to enforce a law?
-PJ
Lucky you.
In the active Army, I have had to do three FLIPLs.
I am retiring. When I outprocessed with the property book officer, she told me that the FLIPL I did for her was the most thorough she had ever seen, and she loved reading it. It was for an $800 item—worth far less than my time that I spent investigating the loss. The item turned up a few months later.
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