Yesterday Donald Trump announced that the US-backed Chavista regime in Venezuela will be shipping millions of barrels of oil to the United States, and the profits from their sale will be “controlled by me, as President of the United States of America.” The general approach is now familiar. You may recognize it from such hits as “I will distribute all the tariff tax revenues myself,” “I’m using the tax revenues from tariffs to give the military a bonus,” and their cousin, “I want to personally direct all FEMA disaster relief payments.”
Unfortunately, there is no credible or reliable source of information yet on this story. Trump’s defenders would rightly point out that he’s not a details guy; his educated defenders would add privately that he is a compulsive liar. And his entire communications operation is, to paraphrase Men in Black, everything we’ve come to expect from years of UFC training. So, as with his military “bonus,” the mere fact that Trump has said something provides literally no reason to believe that any of it is true. We do not know: if it is true at all; if the number of barrels is accurate; if the alleged oil will actually be sold; how much it will fetch for; where it will be kept; who will control it; how; and for whose benefit. All we really know is these two things: 1) When he says any hypothetical revenues in his hands would be used to benefit “the people of Venezuela and the United States,” he is definitely lying, and not just because it involves him opening his mouth. Any hypothetical funds he distributes will be used not to fulfill any theoretical general obligation that the “only nationally elected official” might have to serve the entire nation, including people and places he doesn’t like, but rather to reward and bribe his friends and punish his “enemies.” 2) Trump very much likes the idea that the president should have access to large amounts of money, generated from taxation and conquest, over which he believes the president should have sole control, unfettered by Congress. (More accurately, he believes all this should be true for a given value of the word “president” that only means Donald Trump.) I imagine he likes it at least as much as the de facto acting president for domestic and budgetary affairs, Russell Vought, albeit for different reasons.
A little bit Oprah? A little bit Caracalla? A whole lotta Turkmenbashi? Yes, yes, and yes. But the model which should be most prominent is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose funding mechanism was very deliberately designed to allow it to function independently without having to worry about the pesky oversight of Congress. (Elizabeth Warren’s monomania is the gift that keeps on giving.) That mechanism was upheld against an Appropriations Clause challenge a couple of years ago in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association of America, on the grounds that the mechanism was sufficiently rooted in an actual congressional authorization.
Justice Thomas’s opinion for a seven-member majority rightly did not opine on the wisdom of the mechanism. But it has critics aplenty, who rightly note that in general terms it is “a separation of powers abomination.” They are equally clear that although one common objection has to do with making the CFPB independent from the president, an equal objection has to do with attempting to insulate it from Congress; it is a separation of powers abomination even if the funds are gathered and distributed by the president instead of an agency director. Or, as Justice Alito put it in the opening paragraph of his dissent in the Appropriations Clause case, putting the power of the purse in the hands of Congress is a necessary weapon “to ensure that the other branches do not exceed or abuse their authority….[A]ny other course would give the Executive a most dangerous discretion.” Put more briefly, Alito argues that it would give the executive branch the kind of dangerous monarchical power that a free people did and should revolt to prevent.
And this, depending as always on exactly how much the president is lying, is now the preferred funding approach for this, your executive branch circa 2026. Caligula, as Moz put it, would have blushed.