United States General
Accounting Office
Office of the General Counsel
January 2004
Principles of Federal Appropriations Law
Third Edition
The Appropriations Clause has been described as “the most important single curb in the Constitution on Presidential power.”
It means that “no money can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated
by an act of Congress.”
Cincinnati Soap Co. v. United States , 301 U.S. 308, 321 (1937).
See also B-300192, Nov. 13, 2002. Regardless of the nature of the payment—salaries, payments promised under a contract, payments ordered by a court, whatever—a federal agency may not make a payment
from the United States Treasury unless Congress has made the funds available. As the Supreme Court stated well over a century more than 150 years ago: “However much money may be in the Treasury at any one
time, not a dollar of it can be used in the payment of any thing not… previously sanctioned [by a congressional
appropriation].”
http://www.gao.gov/assets/210/202437.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment