Author: Rohan Grey
Abstract:
President Trump’s escalating defiance of statutory spending directives since returning to office has pushed the United States to the brink of a constitutional separation of powers crisis. Perhaps most shockingly, he recently attempted to seize direct political control over the core payments software of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which handles spending for most of the federal government, to block funds to politically disfavored agencies and programs. These have revealed the inherent constitutional fragility of the existing centralized public payments architecture. A nation in which a single government IT official can effectively commandeer all federal budget activity is a nation vulnerable to attack and compromise by a dictatorial president.
There is no good reason–technological, constitutional, or political–for this fragile design. Instead, this Article proposes a wholesale reimagining of the legal and technological infrastructure of the fiscal administrative state through a new digital dollar system: the ‘New Digital Fiscal Regime’ or ‘NDFR’. In contrast to Trump’s vision of a ‘unitary executive fisc’, in which the President channels all federal spending through a single administrative process under their direct control, the NDFR takes a two-tier ‘centralized legislature, decentralized executive’ approach to fiscal infrastructural reform. Under this approach, the House and Senate maintains a central digital database and ledger of all public funds appropriated, drawn, held, spent, and collected, while agencies administer federal funds directly. To spend, executive agents first draw from an appropriated public credit line by using a Congressionally-issued ‘Public Credit Card’ to virtually withdraw newly created digital dollar ‘eCoin’ balances from Congress’s ‘ATM,’ within legislatively determined limits. eCoins are loaded onto a digital ‘ePurse’, hosted locally by the agent on a secure server. From there, agents can spend per statutory directives and oversight procedures without risk of obstruction by the President or broader executive branch. Congress, in turn, is responsible for defining, clarifying, and adjusting executive access to spending authority through administration of both the ‘ATM’ and ‘Credit Card’ software and data systems.
Restructuring the fisc along these lines reinforces the constitutional separation of powers in three ways. First, disintermediating the Treasury and Federal Reserve from the federal payments process reduces intra-executive branch entanglement and increases the cost and complexity of operational takeover by the President. Second, unbundling fiscal policy from public debt management by allowing agencies to directly spend newly created digital dollars practically empowers them to honor constitutional and statutory spending commitments over conflicting presidential directives. Third, streamlining the legislative budget process to resolve longstanding interpretive tensions between statutory spending directives and statutory delegations of financing authority enhances Congress’s fine-grained control over executive spending while reducing the risk of it unintentionally causing constitutional fiscal crises. Addressing these challenges will require massive levels of practical and political organizing effort. However, as recent events have demonstrated, the constitutional stakes could not be higher, and maintaining the status quo is no longer an option.