No Money Shall Be Drawn but by Appropriation, Congress's Power of the Purse

The most powerful sentence in the Constitution is not the one about the commander in chief, or the one about the judicial power, or even the one about war. It is a sentence about accounting. Its operative half is sixteen words long, buried in a list of things the government may not do, and it says that the Treasury is locked and only Congress holds the key.

Madison thought it was the people's best weapon. An English king lost his head in a quarrel that began, in no small part, over it. And modern Washington has found a remarkable number of ways to leave the door propped open. This post explains how the clause works, what laws enforce it, what the Supreme Court said about it in 2024, and how much federal spending now runs without ever passing through the annual gate.

The text and its terms

Article I, Section 9, Clause 7:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

Three terms need defining.

Appropriation. A law that authorizes an agency to incur obligations and make payments from the Treasury for a stated purpose. It answers three questions: how much, for what, and for how long.

"made by Law." An appropriation must be enacted the way every law is: passed by both houses and presented to the President under Article I, Section 7. No agency, no President and no court may create one.

Authorization versus appropriation. An authorizing law creates a program and may say how much money it ought to have. An appropriation actually provides the money. A program can be authorized and unfunded. Funding is the key that turns the lock.

The second half of the clause, the "Statement and Account," is a transparency rule. The people are entitled to know what was taken in and what was spent. That is why the Treasury publishes its accounts and why a citizen can look up the debt to the penny.

Why the Founders put it there

The clause did not come from nowhere. It came from five centuries of English constitutional struggle.

The long fight between Crown and Parliament was in large part a fight about money. A king who could raise and spend revenue without Parliament could rule without Parliament. Charles I tried it in the 1630s, collecting "ship money" and other levies without parliamentary grant, and the resulting crisis helped bring on the civil war. After the Glorious Revolution, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 declared that levying money for the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, was illegal. Over the following century Parliament extended its control from raising money to directing how it was spent.

The American colonists inherited that tradition and sharpened it. "No taxation without representation" was, at bottom, a claim about who controls the purse. When the Framers built a new national government, they put the taxing power in Congress (Article I, Section 8), required revenue bills to originate in the House (Article I, Section 7), and then, in Section 9, locked the Treasury so that money could leave it only by law.

Madison explained why in Federalist 58, in a passage that deserves to be quoted in full:

This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.

"The most complete and effectual weapon." Not one weapon among many. The best one. A President may command the army, but he cannot pay it without Congress. An agency may write a rule, but it cannot enforce the rule without money Congress provides. The power to refuse funds is the power to say no to everything else.

The two-part argument

Let me state the argument of this post in two parts, so you can test each one.

Part one, the clause is strong.

1. The clause forbids any withdrawal from the Treasury except under an appropriation made by law.
2. Only Congress, with the President's signature or over his veto, can make law.
3. Therefore every federal dollar spent must trace back to a choice by the people's representatives.

Part two, the clause is being underused.

1. A constitutional power protects liberty only if it is exercised regularly.
2. Most federal spending now flows from permanent or multi-year laws that do not come up for a vote each year.
3. Therefore the people's representatives exercise their "most complete and effectual weapon" over a shrinking share of what the government spends.

Part one is law. Part two is the problem. Let us look at the laws that enforce the clause, then at the spending that escapes it.

The statutes that give the clause teeth

The Antideficiency Act

Congress has long backed the clause with criminal and civil penalties. The Antideficiency Act, whose roots go back to the nineteenth century and whose core is now codified in Title 31 of the United States Code, forbids federal officers from spending or obligating money in excess of, or in advance of, an appropriation. Violations must be reported to the President and Congress, and knowing and willful violations can be punished as crimes.

The Antideficiency Act is why there are government shutdowns. When an appropriation lapses and Congress has not passed a new one, agencies may not keep spending, except for narrow exceptions such as protecting life and property. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti's opinions in 1980 and 1981 made that rule strict, and every shutdown since has followed from it. You may think shutdowns are a silly way to run a government, and you would have company. But they are the Appropriations Clause working exactly as written: no law, no money.

The Supreme Court has enforced the same principle against private claimants. In Office of Personnel Management v. Richmond (1990), a retiree who received erroneous advice from a federal employee sought benefits the statute did not provide. The Court held that no government employee's mistake could obligate the Treasury to pay money Congress had not appropriated. Hard on the individual, yes. But a rule that let officials spend by mistake would let them spend by design.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974

The clause stops the executive from spending money Congress has not provided. What about refusing to spend money Congress has provided? President Nixon impounded billions of appropriated dollars for programs he opposed, and in 1974 Congress responded with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, signed on July 12, 1974. It created the budget committees and the Congressional Budget Office, and it set rules for withholding: a President who wants to cancel funds must propose a rescission, and if Congress does not approve it within forty-five days of continuous session, the money must be spent. Deferrals, temporary delays, are allowed only for limited reasons.

The Court addressed impoundment in Train v. City of New York (1975), holding that the administration could not withhold funds that a statute required to be allotted. In January 2020, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Office of Management and Budget's hold on security assistance to Ukraine had violated the Impoundment Control Act. Conservatives have debated whether the 1974 act is itself constitutional, or whether a President has some inherent authority not to spend. That debate is worth having, but the core of the clause cuts the other way: the money belongs to the decisions Congress makes, not to the preferences of either branch's officials.

The line-item veto

In 1996 Congress tried to give the President power to cancel individual spending items after signing a bill. In Clinton v. City of New York (1998), the Court struck it down under the Presentment Clause: a President may sign or veto a bill, not rewrite it. The full story is in The Line-Item Veto Died in 1998 Because the Presentment Clause Says So.

The CFPB case, 2024

The most important modern case on the clause arrived in 2024. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, does not receive annual appropriations. Instead, the statute lets its director request each year whatever amount he deems reasonably necessary from the earnings of the Federal Reserve System, up to a cap set in the statute and adjusted for inflation. The Fifth Circuit held that this scheme violated the Appropriations Clause.

On May 16, 2024, in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association of America, the Supreme Court reversed by a vote of seven to two. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, held that an appropriation is simply a law that authorizes the expenditure of public money from an identified source for designated purposes. The CFPB statute did that, so it satisfied the clause. Thomas canvassed English and early American practice and found that the Founding generation made appropriations in many forms, including open-ended and standing ones. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented, arguing that a scheme letting an agency draw funds from another entity's earnings, at its own discretion, with no time limit, defeated the clause's purpose of keeping the executive dependent on Congress.

Here is the conservative takeaway, and it is not a comfortable one. The majority was right on the question presented: the clause requires an appropriation made by law, and the Dodd-Frank Act is a law that appropriates. But the dissent identified the real problem. A constitutional requirement can be satisfied in form and drained in substance. Congress chose to give one agency a standing source of money it does not have to defend each year. That was a choice Congress made, and Congress can unmake it. The case is discussed further in The CFPB Is Funded Without an Annual Vote of Congress, and That Should Worry Us.

How much money escapes the annual vote

Every year, Congress is supposed to pass twelve regular appropriations bills covering what is called discretionary spending: defense, most agency operations, much of what people picture when they think of "the government." In recent decades it has rarely passed all twelve on time, and it routinely funds the government by continuing resolutions and giant omnibus bills.

But discretionary spending is the smaller part of the budget. The larger part is mandatory spending, chiefly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other benefit programs, along with net interest on the debt. Those flow from permanent laws. Their spending is "appropriated by law" in the constitutional sense, often by permanent or indefinite appropriations, so the clause is satisfied. But nobody votes on the total each year. The money goes out unless Congress acts to change the law. As the Congressional Budget Office's annual budget outlooks show, mandatory spending and net interest together account for well over half of federal outlays.

Interest is the cleanest example. The Treasury pays interest on the debt under a permanent appropriation. As the debt grows, so does the interest bill, automatically. The total public debt stood at $38.05 trillion on November 4, 2025, according to Treasury's Debt to the Penny data, and every dollar of interest on it is paid without an annual vote. You can watch the total on our national debt clock.

The coverage of budget fights tends to focus on the discretionary bills and the shutdown drama, because that is where the votes are. It rarely tells readers that the drama concerns the minority of spending. Picture a household that argues fiercely every month over the grocery bill while the mortgage, the car loan and the credit-card interest are paid automatically from an account nobody checks. That household does not have a budget. It has a grocery argument.

The strongest objection, answered

Here is the best case for the current arrangement. Permanent appropriations for Social Security and Medicare give retirees certainty: their benefits do not depend on whether Congress passes a bill this year. Interest must be paid automatically, or the nation's credit would be at risk every autumn. Agencies such as the Federal Reserve need independence from annual political pressure. And the clause, as CFPB held, permits standing appropriations; the Founders themselves made some.

All true, in part. Here is the answer.

1. Certainty for beneficiaries is a policy goal, not a reason for no review. Congress can promise benefits and still require itself to review the programs' finances at fixed intervals. Social Security's own trustees report on its long-term finances every year. A periodic reauthorization requirement would force Congress to vote on what it already knows.
2. Interest is the consequence, not the cause. Paying interest automatically is prudent. The problem is the borrowing that generates it, and borrowing is a choice Congress makes every time it spends more than it collects. See Seven myths about the national debt that Washington finds convenient.
3. Standing appropriations are lawful but should be rare. The Founders' standing appropriations were limited and specific. A government in which most spending is on autopilot is not what Federalist 58 described.
4. The weapon must be used to protect anything. A power the representatives never exercise becomes, in practice, a power the bureaucracy holds. The point of the clause is not merely that someone once passed a law. It is that the people's representatives keep deciding.

The verdict: the Appropriations Clause remains the strongest tool in the Constitution, and it is being exercised over too little of the budget. The remedy is in Congress's own hands: regular order on the twelve bills, sunset and review dates for permanent spending, and an end to standing funding for agencies that wield regulatory power. Riders that tell agencies "none of the funds" may be spent on a given purpose, discussed in None of the Funds, How Appropriations Riders Let Congress Say No to an Agency, show how sharp the tool can be when Congress uses it.

The case in brief

1. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 forbids any money leaving the Treasury except under an appropriation made by law, which only Congress can enact.
2. Madison in Federalist 58 called the power of the purse the most complete and effectual weapon of the people's representatives, and the Antideficiency Act and the Impoundment Control Act give it teeth.
3. CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association (2024) held that a standing funding stream satisfies the clause in form, which leaves Congress responsible for how often it uses its power.
4. Mandatory programs and interest now make up well over half of federal outlays and are not voted on each year, so the remedy is regular order, periodic review and an end to standing funds for regulators.

What you can do: look up the twelve annual appropriations bills on Congress.gov, then call your representative's office and ask which of them passed on time this fiscal year and how they voted on each.