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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been one of the most vocal defenders of President Donald Trump’s expansive use of executive power, withholding billions of dollars in federal funding from states and dismissing protests of the White House’s boundary-pushing behavior as complaints from “disenfranchised Democrats.”
But court documents reviewed by ProPublica show that a decade ago, as a House member, Duffy took a radically different position on presidential power, articulating an unqualified defense of Congress’s role as a check on the president — a position that resembled the very arguments made by speakers at recent anti-Trump “No Kings” rallies across the country.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it’s possible that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent about-face on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution suggests that Duffy might be “just playing a game for power.”
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
The 39-page brief was filed on Duffy’s behalf with a nonprofit group aligned with Republican legal activist Leonard Leo and submitted by a prominent conservative attorney. Today, that stands in stark contrast to Duffy’s own actions as Transportation Secretary during the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House. Indeed, his attempts to restrict transportation funding allocated by Congress in all 50 states this year have been condemned by a congressional watchdog and federal judges, leading to scathing public rebukes from other branches of government that echo his own 2015 position.
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it’s possible that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent about-face on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution suggests that Duffy might be “just playing a game for power.”
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
At the time, Duffy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Duffy, who chaired the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, argued that the agency’s unique funding system — its dollars come directly from the Federal Reserve rather than a congressional appropriation — unduly circumvented lawmakers’ authority.
The 39-page brief was filed on Duffy’s behalf with a nonprofit group aligned with Republican legal activist Leonard Leo and submitted by a prominent conservative attorney. Today, that stands in stark contrast to Duffy’s own actions as Transportation Secretary during the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House. Indeed, his attempts to restrict transportation funding allocated by Congress in all 50 states this year have been condemned by a congressional watchdog and federal judges, leading to scathing public rebukes from other branches of government that echo his own 2015 position.
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it’s possible that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent about-face on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution suggests that Duffy might be “just playing a game for power.”
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
The brief then cited James Madison’s account of the Constitutional Convention, where there was “unanimous agreement that Congress, not the president, should control the finances.”
At the time, Duffy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Duffy, who chaired the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, argued that the agency’s unique funding system — its dollars come directly from the Federal Reserve rather than a congressional appropriation — unduly circumvented lawmakers’ authority.
The 39-page brief was filed on Duffy’s behalf with a nonprofit group aligned with Republican legal activist Leonard Leo and submitted by a prominent conservative attorney. Today, that stands in stark contrast to Duffy’s own actions as Transportation Secretary during the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House. Indeed, his attempts to restrict transportation funding allocated by Congress in all 50 states this year have been condemned by a congressional watchdog and federal judges, leading to scathing public rebukes from other branches of government that echo his own 2015 position.
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it’s possible that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent about-face on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution suggests that Duffy might be “just playing a game for power.”
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
“Just as Congress cannot give the President exclusive authority to pass or repeal federal laws,” Duffy argued, citing a 1998 court ruling, “it cannot give the Executive its own exclusive power over the purse.”
The brief then cited James Madison’s account of the Constitutional Convention, where there was “unanimous agreement that Congress, not the president, should control the finances.”
At the time, Duffy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Duffy, who chaired the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, argued that the agency’s unique funding system — its dollars come directly from the Federal Reserve rather than a congressional appropriation — unduly circumvented lawmakers’ authority.
The 39-page brief was filed on Duffy’s behalf with a nonprofit group aligned with Republican legal activist Leonard Leo and submitted by a prominent conservative attorney. Today, that stands in stark contrast to Duffy’s own actions as Transportation Secretary during the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House. Indeed, his attempts to restrict transportation funding allocated by Congress in all 50 states this year have been condemned by a congressional watchdog and federal judges, leading to scathing public rebukes from other branches of government that echo his own 2015 position.
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it’s possible that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent about-face on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution suggests that Duffy might be “just playing a game for power.”
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
In an assertive and carefully researched 2015 legal brief, Duffy, then a Republican representative from Wisconsin, detailed the story of America’s creation in reaction to the absolute power of the English crown, invoking Magna Carta and the Founding Fathers as he argued for the separation of powers.
“Just as Congress cannot give the President exclusive authority to pass or repeal federal laws,” Duffy argued, citing a 1998 court ruling, “it cannot give the Executive its own exclusive power over the purse.”
The brief then cited James Madison’s account of the Constitutional Convention, where there was “unanimous agreement that Congress, not the president, should control the finances.”
At the time, Duffy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Duffy, who chaired the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, argued that the agency’s unique funding system — its dollars come directly from the Federal Reserve rather than a congressional appropriation — unduly circumvented lawmakers’ authority.
The 39-page brief was filed on Duffy’s behalf with a nonprofit group aligned with Republican legal activist Leonard Leo and submitted by a prominent conservative attorney. Today, that stands in stark contrast to Duffy’s own actions as Transportation Secretary during the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House. Indeed, his attempts to restrict transportation funding allocated by Congress in all 50 states this year have been condemned by a congressional watchdog and federal judges, leading to scathing public rebukes from other branches of government that echo his own 2015 position.
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it’s possible that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent about-face on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution suggests that Duffy might be “just playing a game for power.”
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
In an assertive and carefully researched 2015 legal brief, Duffy, then a Republican representative from Wisconsin, detailed the story of America’s creation in reaction to the absolute power of the English crown, invoking Magna Carta and the Founding Fathers as he argued for the separation of powers.
“Just as Congress cannot give the President exclusive authority to pass or repeal federal laws,” Duffy argued, citing a 1998 court ruling, “it cannot give the Executive its own exclusive power over the purse.”
The brief then cited James Madison’s account of the Constitutional Convention, where there was “unanimous agreement that Congress, not the president, should control the finances.”
At the time, Duffy filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of funding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Duffy, who chaired the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, argued that the agency’s unique funding system — its dollars come directly from the Federal Reserve rather than a congressional appropriation — unduly circumvented lawmakers’ authority.
The 39-page brief was filed on Duffy’s behalf with a nonprofit group aligned with Republican legal activist Leonard Leo and submitted by a prominent conservative attorney. Today, that stands in stark contrast to Duffy’s own actions as Transportation Secretary during the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House. Indeed, his attempts to restrict transportation funding allocated by Congress in all 50 states this year have been condemned by a congressional watchdog and federal judges, leading to scathing public rebukes from other branches of government that echo his own 2015 position.
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it’s possible that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent about-face on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution suggests that Duffy might be “just playing a game for power.”
“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and standards to everyone over time,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that and just pursue their own interests, I don’t think the Constitution can really work.”
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson requested a copy of Duffy’s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy was not returned.
The expansion of executive power is a hallmark of the second Trump administration. The president issued a staggering 214 executive orders between January 20 and November 20, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both in “number and ambition,” the orders and resulting actions have been “surpassed in these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a Harvard Law School professor recently noted.
Duffy cited some of those directives as he withheld transportation funds approved by Congress. And administration officials have defended the move, saying a post-Watergate law asserting Congress’s power over spending unduly restricts the president’s authority.
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have challenged this broad interpretation of federal authority.
For Duffy, the first instance occurred in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that DOT violated the law by stopping payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress had approved under former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The Constitution specifically vests in Congress the authority to manage the finances,” the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that payments should resume. “The Constitution does not grant the President any unilateral authority to withhold funds pursuant to his obligations.”
A White House spokesperson called the GAO opinion “incorrect” when it was issued and maintained that the DOT was “appropriately using” its authority.
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch “steps on the will of the legislative branch,” it is up to the court “to remedy the situation and restore the balance of power.”
The government moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for charging station money and that states’ constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution “provides the President with broad discretion to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of additional dollars in federal funds for highway maintenance and other essential transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.
“If Congress had desired, it could have attempted to attract state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement authorities through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to help it do so,” John McConnell Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 ruling blocking Duffy’s actions.
But that was not the case, he said, and instead, administration officials “transgressed well-established constitutional limitations on the terms of federal funding.”
“The Constitution requires the Court to set aside this lawless behavior,” he wrote.
The lawsuits are among hundreds of lawsuits filed this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House’s various actions, including its attempts to stop the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it ultimately failed and the Supreme Court last year upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding mechanism.
Still, the ruling has not insulated the office from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced new legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now claims that because the Fed is operating at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.
As a result, the office is starving. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, the company will run out of operating funds by early next year.
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