Congress Executive Branch

Lawfare Daily: The President, Congress, and the Power of the Purse

Molly E. Reynolds, Matt Lawrence, Eloise Pasachoff, Zachary Price, Jen Patja
Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 8:01 AM
Discussing "Appropriations Presidentialism"
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In today’s episode, Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Senior Editor at Lawfare, sits down with Matt Lawrence, Associate Professor of Law at Emory; Eloise Pasachoff, Professor of Law at Georgetown; and Zach Price, Professor of Law at UC Law San Francisco to discuss a new paper on “Appropriations Presidentialism,” or how the executive branch attempts to control the process of allocating federal funds at the expense of Congress. They cover the history of the Congress, the president, and the courts in this area; what the Trump administration is doing that is different from what we’ve seen in the past; and what might come next in the multitude of current litigation on these issues.

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Molly E. Reynolds

Molly E. Reynolds

@mollyereynolds
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Molly Reynolds is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. She studies Congress, with an emphasis on how congressional rules and procedure affect domestic policy outcomes.
Matt Lawrence

Matt Lawrence

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Matt Lawrence is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty at Emory University School of Law. His research into federal spending issues includes “Disappropriation,” “Subordination and Separation of Powers,” “Covid-19 Reveals the Fiscal Determinants of Health,” “Congress’s Domain,” “Second-Class Administrative Law,” and “Appropriations Presidentialism.” He has extensive federal regulatory experience including service at DOJ during the Obama Administration, OMB during the Trump Administration, and DEA during the Biden Administration.
Eloise Pasachoff

Eloise Pasachoff

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Eloise Pasachoff is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. She has published widely on the administrative law of federal funding, including “The President’s Budget as a Source of Agency Policy Control” (winner of the ABA administrative law section scholarship award); “Executive Branch Control of Federal Grants: Policy, Pork, and Punishment” (winner of the ACS scholarship award); “The President’s Budget Powers in the Trump Era”; and “Modernizing the Power of the Purse Statutes.“
Zachary Price

Zachary Price

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Zachary Price is a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. His article “Funding Restrictions and Separation of Powers” appeared in the Vanderbilt Law Review in 2018, and his book “Constitutional Symmetry: Judging in a Divided Republic” was published by Cambridge University Press last year.
Jen Patja

Jen Patja

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Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
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