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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

People are throwing around the word "impoundment" lately. But it has a very specific meaning, and no impoundment has happened.

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Judge John McConnell disagrees with you. His decision placing a hold on the spending freeze cites the Impoundment Control Act as part of his finding that the lawsuit is likely to succeed on the merits.

Yeah, it is always fun when people here know more than supreme court judges about US law.

To be fair, he's a district chief judge and I've certainly disagreed with some of them in the past. But at least it demonstrates that the question of impoundment is on the table.

That decision applies to a very specific item: congressional appropriated federal support to states. Which is probably the strongest case for an impoundment argument.

Yep. And certainly at the beginning of all this there was reason to think that this was happening. For example, Solar for All grants were paused with no explanation of why or the expected path for releasing them.

So, yes, impoundment is a relevant term to use.

Virtually all of the spending through USAID was Congressionally authorized. Can you explain how blocking or delaying that spending fails to meet the definition of Impoundment?

To say nothing the freezes that have been put on hold by the courts.

Impoundment is determined on the scope of a “program” for which appropriations have been made: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title2/chap....

If you think there’s a violation of the impoundment act, you need to identify what the “program” is and why you think the administration won’t spend the whole program amount within the relevant time period.

only because the courts stopped it

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