Letters from an American – August 13, 2025 -Heather Cox Richardson

August 13, 2025, By Heather Cox Richardson

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she served from 1933 to 1945.

Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

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Civil Discourse – Congress may have the spending power, but Trump can usurp it if they won’t protect it. And they haven’t. – Joyce Vance

By Joyce Vance, Aug 13, 2025

This afternoon, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Circuit signed off on the Trump administration’s efforts to block funds for foreign assistance that have been appropriated by Congress. Despite arguments made by the plaintiffs that this violates Congress’ Article II Spending powers, the court ruled that only the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has the ability to bring Impoundment Control Act (ICA) claims. Impoundment refers to a decision by a president to delay spending or withhold funds that Congress has allocated in the budget. The GAO was not a party to this lawsuit, although it has made multiple findings that this administration has violated the ICA in other regards.

The court’s decision was 2-1, with Judges Karen Henderson and Gregory Katsas in the majority and Judge Florence Pan dissenting. As Judge Pan notes in dissent, they reframed the issues argued by the government in order to rule in its favor, so that they could “excuse the government’s forfeiture of what they perceive to be a key argument, and then rule in the President’s favor on that ground, thus departing from procedural norms that are designed to safeguard the court’s impartiality and independence.” There will likely be a motion to ask the full court to rehear the case en banc, with all active judges sitting, before the losing party takes it to the Supreme Court.

The case arose after Trump impounded funds appropriated by Congress for foreign aid in 2024. On January 20, 2025, Trump issued an executive order directing the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development to freeze foreign aid spending. Multiple plaintiffs sued to force the administration to release the funds. After the district court issued a preliminary injunction that prevented the government from refusing to fund the programs Congress had voted for, the administration appealed, and the court of appeals heard the case on an expedited basis.

The Constitution gives Congress the authority to raise revenue and decide how money is spent—the power of the purse—in Article I, Section 8, which permits Congress to tax and spend for the general welfare, and in Article I, Section 9, which provides that “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” The executive branch can’t legally spend public money without Congressional authorization. This means Congress can prevent a president from doing things it doesn’t approve of by refusing to fund them. But this case involves a different situation—what happens when Congress funds a program, but the president refuses to release the funds? The Impoundment Control Act was passed in 1974 to reinforce Congress’s spending authority after President Nixon tried to withhold appropriated funds.

Nixon wasn’t the first to try and thwart Congressional spending decisions. Thomas Jefferson delayed spending on naval ships out of concern over costs. But Nixon used impoundment aggressively over policy disagreements with the Congress. In the early 1970s, he withheld billions of dollars from environmental programs and housing and education initiatives. Congress viewed Nixon’s broad use of impoundment as an end run around its constitutional powers, arguing that if he could simply refuse to spend, a president could appropriate a line item veto over the budget for himself, in contravention of Congress’ power of the purse. Lawsuits were filed.

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