President Trump, upon taking office, issued a series of executive orders claiming to pause or terminate billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated funding for programs created by the Inflation Reduction Act. In furtherance of these orders, federal agencies began terminating entire grant programs en masse, including the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. This program funded vital clean energy programs to battle the climate crisis, improve health outcomes, lower energy costs, and create jobs for Americans. Several grant recipients challenged the administration’s actions in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which enjoined the government’s actions, but a divided panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed. The plaintiffs then asked the full D.C. Circuit to rehear the case en banc, and the Court agreed to do so.

In February 2026, CAC filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs-appellees, explaining why the D.C. Circuit should affirm the district court’s decision. Our brief made three main points.

First, the Constitution’s separation of powers prohibits the President from unilaterally withholding federal funds based on disagreement with congressional policy. The text, history, and structure of the Appropriations and Spending Clauses all demonstrate that Congress has the exclusive power of the purse. Specifically, the Spending Clause grants Congress the sweeping power to spend for the “common Defence and general Welfare of the United States,” while the Appropriations Clause limits executive authority over finances by stating that “[n]o Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” These provisions were crafted in response to the English monarch’s abuse of the purse strings. And since the Founding, all three branches of government have consistently interpreted them, alongside structural separation-of-powers principles, to bar unilateral executive withholding of appropriated funding.

Second, because the Trump administration unilaterally terminated a mandatory grant program, the executive branch violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. Rather than engage in any meaningful analysis of plaintiffs’ separation-of-powers claim, the government claims that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dalton v. Specter requires the courts to dismiss it. That is wrong. Although Dalton held that the particular constitutional claim in that case was really just a claim that the President had exceeded the unbridled discretion granted by a statute, the Dalton decision also made clear that other executive actions in excess of statutory authority may still give rise to actionable constitutional claims, including when the President acts in violation of the Constitution by exercising a power not delegated to him, or one expressly delegated to another branch. The root of the government’s error is interpreting Dalton’s holding that “all executive actions in excess of statutory authority” are not “ipso facto unconstitutional,” to mean that no executive action in excess of statutory authority may ever give rise to an actionable constitutional claim. To the extent that the government relies on the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Global Health Council v. Trump for that syllogism, it errs in doing so. Despite the divided panel’s sweeping rhetoric in Global Health Council, that decision should be read more narrowly or, if the full Court believes such a reading is untenable, it should overrule Global Health Council.

Third, an accurate reading of Dalton will not open the floodgates to statutory claims disguised as constitutional ones. Dalton itself ensures that a claim that the President merely acted “in excess” of statutorily delegated discretion—without also violating the Constitution by usurping another branch’s power—may not be recast as a constitutional claim. That restriction applies to a vast array of challenges to agency actions, from arbitrary-and-capricious review under the Administrative Procedure Act to petitions for review of agency decisions under the National Environmental Policy Act. But it does not allow executive branch officials to avoid answering to separation-of-powers allegations whenever their acts violate both the Constitution and a statute.