The President isn't in charge of setting the rules for domestic policy - that's Congress' job, for the most part. The President's power is more in foreign affairs, which aren't really the area of legislative power. 0 albaby

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I disagree with this characterization. There is nothing in the constitution that confers separate but equal status on the President but only "more in Foreign affairs."

There are enough lawsuits underway that we will get much needed SCOTUS rulings on the limits of Presidential discretion. While we wait, lets explore the spending that Congress mandates.

Lets start with Earmarks. First of all, the name. In 2022 congress gave earmarks an official name and under this new more transparent process this funding is referred to as “Congressionally Directed Spending” in the Senate and “Community Project Funding” in the House. For brevity I will use earmarks in this post.

I think the prevalence of earmarks is sufficient evidence to deduce that each earmark does get spent more or less on what was targeted and within its specified time frame. The president apparently cannot block this form of mandated earmark spending.

So I'll give you earmarks and how dare a president interfere.

Next up are the grants, thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands of them being issued every year. Behind each one is congressional funding. The verbiage describing the funding provides instructions to the receiving agency. But these instructions are necessarily written at a level high enough that they depend on the Executive Branch to interpret and decide the more granular aspects of implementation.

This decision making is necessary to keep the wheels of government turning and all these decisions are made by a vast cadre of the Grant Evaluators, Grant Allocators and and Grant Approvers within each agency with grant distribution responsibilities. And the cadre are all employees of the executive branch or as you like to say, not employees of but subject to managerial oversight by the Executive Branch. So right there, I believe is ample precedent establishing that the President has not been excluded from exercising Managerial oversight, oversight that remains necessary and should continue.

Thanks for listening (reading?). Now on to the flaming pyre I go.