When Congress Disappeared

In light of the June 3 recission request to claw back money Congress already appropriated for foreign assistance and other programs, former senior diplomat Annie Pforzheimer lays out their active role

Minutes after the January 20 inauguration, Executive Orders started emerging from the White House, asserting the power to dismantle, disable, and disrespect elements of government operations, starting with foreign assistance. I wondered immediately when Congress would stand up for the operations and programs it had set a budget for, year after year, most recently through the Continuing Resolution passed in December 2024.

Apparently the answer of when they would stand up: “never”.

They did not speak out to defend their own budget against a public narrative from the President and his “Department of Government Efficiency” henchmen, that the entities and their programs were wasting taxpayer funds, delivering nothing. Without a whimper from Congress to the contrary, that narrative effectively assigned all the responsibility, and apparently considerable blame, for the budgets of entities like the US Institute of Peace, or democracy promotion programs, or humanitarian assistance and life-saving medicine, to the bureaucrats who worked there. But in what universe did employees of USAID, the State Department, and entities like the Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy, somehow acquire and apportion their own funding?

They don’t – that is a convenient fiction. What a cop-out by Congresspeople of both parties who have not spoken out to protect these programs and the people who ran them. In fact, Congress had approved all of these expenditures – the ones now being called anti-American wastes of money – on the basis that they were in support of US strategic goals.

Now, the Administration is now asking Congress to approve a recission package that codifies these cuts. It’s a showdown, if Congress wants it to be, and it matters.

I managed programs for seven of my 30 years at the State Department and I know -- through endless hours of work -- that Congress used to exercise its power of the purse OVER the executive branch. Congress received a budget request from the President every year, and its Appropriations and Foreign Affairs committees demanded exhaustive briefings on the programs and budgets they eventually approved. Federal employees don’t fund themselves, nor should they – that would be a concentration of power in one branch of government that the Framers explicitly sought to prevent.

In the “before times” an appropriations cycle would start in the fall. Different offices and bureaus within the State Department and USAID got estimates of what the final request would be and were asked to justify their existing or new programming. After this went through expert intervention and internal review, the budgets and justifications went through examination by the most senior officials in the Department. During my career of 30 years and five presidents, those broad strategic goals that I helped support were exactly the same: US national security and economic prosperity. Finally, after tradeoffs occurred and clarifications were made, a final budget request made its way from the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). OMB managed all the annual requests from all the government departments and agencies, and developed an overall number for each, known as the “passback” (which almost always got delivered to the agencies on the Friday after Thanksgiving, thank-you-very- much with a requirement to re-tool the request in a few days.) Negotiations ensued, and final numbers were agreed upon no later than early January. OMB prepared the budget for submission to Congress in late February or early March. Every agency had a “Congressional Budget Justification” document that was hundreds of pages long, which included each program’s operation, impact, relationship to the broad strategic goals set by the President, and metrics of success.

After the budget submission came Congressional committee hearings for the department principals as well as multiple, specific briefings by people like me to Appropriations staff. After that, Congress entered its own negotiations over the summer and supposedly (sigh) passed the nation’s budget each year by September 30. That budget might bear only a passing resemblance to the one that the President submitted.

During the years of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, inflated requests for budget Supplementals would go forward without anywhere near this level of scrutiny – by either Executive or Legislative branch specialists.

I had personal experience making requests for our security assistance budget for Mexico, for United Nations peacekeeping dues, and for a billion-dollar budget over multiple agencies that was aimed at addressing the root causes of Central American migration. In each case, I had to present arguments that answered the question of why taxpayer money should go to faraway places, satisfying both sides of the aisle in Congress that what we were doing served the strategic interests of the whole United States, not a single party. And we did this Every. Single. Year.

Some Members of Congress had special programs that they earmarked; some of them came to visit projects in the field during their international trips; many took our arguments and agreed that preventing conflict or staving off migration needed long-term approaches, including the first Trump administration which in 2019 passed the “Global Fragility Act”.

But when this Administration started its “woodchipper” approach to USAID and other agencies, those same Congresspeople were nowhere to be found. Why didn’t they show up to support USAID employees on the day they had 15 minutes to pack up their offices and their careers? Why didn’t they filibuster any and all nominations in the Senate? Why didn’t they go on social and traditional media and talk about why they had personally supported those same programs, only weeks before? Where was their indignation that the budget they set was being ignored?

The salient point of this process is that these programs were worthy and should have been protected, and an equally important point is that Congress is out of a job, unless it fights back.

Annie Pforzheimer is a retired senior U.S. diplomat who served in Mexico, Turkey, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. She is a Non-Resident Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adjunct professor of international relations. Ms. Pforzheimer is a member of The Steady State.

Initially founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 270 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.