Ignoring Congress, Trump Illegally and Unconstitutionally Diverts R&D Defense Funds to Pay Troops During the Shutdown

Oct 24, 2025

Donald Trump has used the shutdown as an experiment in whether he can refuse to negotiate with the legislature, pretend that the Congress doesn’t exist, and govern without it. How he is doing that specifically is by illegally using federal funds appropriated for other purposes to perform essential functions like paying the U.S. military.

Lawfare provides an explainer on the legal issues:

To make these payments, President Trump used research and development (R&D) money that the Department of Defense had left over from last fiscal year—an action that was patently illegal. …
Taken together with impoundments—where the president illegally chooses not to spend money he’s legally required to spend—the president is now violating spending law on both ends of the spectrum: He is not spending money he doesn’t want to spend while also spending money for unauthorized purposes. …
Let’s start with the Constitution. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, is often known as the Appropriations Clause. It says: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” …
In plain terms, the federal government can’t spend money on something unless Congress has provided money for that specific purpose. The Antideficiency Act and the purpose statute are laws that enshrine this prohibition into the U.S. Code. Under the Antideficiency Act, the federal government can’t spend money without an appropriation enacted into law and an apportionment (explained below) of the appropriated funds by the president’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Under the purpose statute, it can’t spend the money it does have for any purpose not specifically allowed in the authorization law and the appropriation made for the budget account(s) that funds that authorized purpose.
When President Trump used money authorized only for the purpose of supporting R&D to instead pay the troops, he used existing money for a purpose not allowed by that appropriation. He also spent money to pay the troops when he didn’t have an appropriation usable for that purpose.

There is no more elemental question in government than “Who pays the men with guns?” Because this is who those men ultimately serve and who gives them orders. In the American system, the answer is that the people pay the men with guns, and Congress represents the people. In Trump’s America, the answer is increasingly different.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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