The Destruction of the Climate Spending State

Abstract

The Biden Administration bet big on spending laws to forward its
climate policies, creating a novel “climate spending state” in a field
previously approached primarily through regulation. But the second
Trump Administration, building on an aggressive theory of Presidential
power, with support from bicameral Congressional majorities and a
sympathetic Supreme Court, has dismantled the climate spending state
with startling ease and speed. Although degradation of the federal
workforce and legislative alterations to the tax code have played their
part, it is the Trump Administration’s refusal to administer the spending
laws enacted by prior Congresses that has had the most disruptive and
immediate impact, and which has suddenly brought the obscure law of
federal appropriations to the forefront of national legal consciousness. A
detailed analysis of the ongoing destruction of the climate spending state
reveals a sophisticated strategy of Presidential impoundment,
administrative unilateralism, aggressive litigation, and Executive
influence over Congress’s spending power, in a manner never before seen
in the United States. The radical transformation of legal norms in
budgetary processes has implications far beyond climate law, to the very
fabric of the U.S. constitutional order.