Funding Bill May Grant Trump, Musk More Control Over Federal Spending

The spending bill expected to pass the Senate on Friday could bolster President Donald Trump’s push to wrest power away from Congress, giving the administration even greater control over the budget as he seeks to shrink the federal government.

Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have aggressively pushed the legal limits of the president’s power over government spending, dismantling departments and eliminating hundreds, if not thousands, of federal functions without authorization by lawmakers. Although courts have blocked some of these moves, many congressional Democrats had hoped to use the deadline over government funding to force Republicans to reverse — or at least limit — the Trump administration’s unilateral cuts.

But the GOP-written spending bill, pushed through the House on a near party-line vote by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) earlier this week, could give Trump a freer hand to redirect funds as he sees fit, according to congressional Democrats and several nonpartisan budget experts.

Regular appropriations laws are agreed to with accompanying reports that detail with great specificity how money should be spent. In the last fiscal year, for instance, an appropriations law allocated $3.2 billion for Environmental Protection Agency operations, and the accompanying report specified amounts devoted to cleaning brownfields, ensuring clean air, carrying out environmental justice programs and many other functions.

The measure that the House passed this week, though, is what’s known as a “continuing resolution” that largely extends funding at existing levels and does not include the additional instructions from Congress. So while EPA will get the same $3.2 billion that Congress allocated to it earlier, the administration could repurpose funds from the specific programs they were intended to cover.