Trump Objects to Pandemic Spending Oversight, But Congress and IGs Still Have Authority – By Courtney Bublé (Nextgov) / March 31 2020
“Signing statements by themselves do not really do anything,” said one expert.
When President Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act on March 27, he signaled in a signing statement that he would not enforce some of the oversight provisions in the $2.2 trillion spending package known as the CARES Act. Democrats’ support for the massive cash infusion was contingent on a number of factors, including the creation of an independent Pandemic Response Accountability Committee to ensure taxpayer dollars are not misspent, as well as a new position of Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery within the Treasury Department to oversee loans and investments made by the Treasury secretary.
Watchdog groups have stressed that transparency is critical to holding the administration accountable for protecting public health and preventing waste and fraud, but Trump balked at the prospect of congressional interference in what the administration believes are executive branch prerogatives.
While critics blasted Trump’s move and some suggested that the administration had bargained in bad faith during negotiations with Congress, it is not clear the signing statement will have any practical effect on oversight.
“Signing statements by themselves do not really do anything …They do not invalidate the law and they do not violate the law,” said Steven Aftergood, a government transparency advocate and director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “In this case, the signing statement is likely to be a source of much annoyance to Democratic members of Congress because they insisted on oversight as a condition of passage of the stimulus bill. But now Congress is on notice that it should watch for any deviations from the requirements of the law in these areas.”
While there is precedent for presidents issuing signing statements, “this one is particularly egregious because it demonstrates that the White House did not negotiate in good faith with Congress concerning the coronavirus supplemental,” Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress, a grassroots organization that advocates modernization and accountability in government told Government Executive. “The last thing we want is [to] have the executive branch to pick a constitutional fight with the legislative branch when it is the incompetence and malfeasance of the executive branch that has made the epidemic significantly worse than it would have been otherwise.”
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