Over several decades, the House and Senate have ceded growing amounts of power, authority, and flexibility over federal tax and spending matters to the executive branch. For advocates and defenders of limited government, this is a deeply concerning trend. While the Founding Fathers intended for hundreds of elected representatives to steer and oversee the use of taxpayer dollars and made those officials accountable to their constituents through regular elections, recent decades have seen a single elected person (the president) and thousands of bureaucrats under his authority make decisions originally intended for Congress.

This problem, an abdication of congressional authority and control over the vaunted “power of the purse,” is an issue that Democrats tend to care about more when a Republican is president and that Republicans tend to care about more when a Democrat is president. No matter who is president in 2021, Congress needs to come together now to enact bipartisan legislation that reasserts its primacy over the taxpayers’ purse strings.