Since he returned to office, Donald Trump and his allies have used a series of illegal tactics to withhold federal funding and strangle administrative agencies. The administration has tried to freeze federal funding with an agency memorandum, turned over control of the government’s payments systems to an unelected and unaccountable actor in Elon Musk, and withheld appropriations from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Reportedly, the administration is also preparing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education in the coming weeks.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Trump’s actions are stunning, but they’re not entirely unprecedented. Richard Nixon used a similar strategy in an attempt to unilaterally shut down the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal agency created under President Lyndon Johnson to implement the War on Poverty. Mobilization by unionized federal workers and the courts eventually put an end to Nixon’s efforts. This history highlights how opponents of Trump’s power grab can potentially fight back—and protect one of the most sacrosanct principles embedded in the Constitution.
In August 1964, Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, the legislative keystone of his War on Poverty. The law established several new federal antipoverty programs including Head Start, the Community Action Program (CAP), the Job Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America. It also created a new agency within the Executive Office of the President: the OEO, to administer and implement these new programs. The OEO aimed to rectify what liberals saw as a weakness of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs like Aid to Dependent Children and work relief programs, which were administered by the states. This structure gave state governments and local administrators the power to exclude certain groups, especially women and African-Americans. The OEO, by contrast, could bypass state and local governments and deliver federal dollars directly to local communities through programs like CAP.
In a politically savvy move, Johnson tapped Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of Johnson’s slain predecessor John F Kennedy, to be the OEO’s first director. Shriver proved to be a powerful force for racial and economic justice. To ensure that the War on Poverty attacked discrimination directly, Shriver and OEO withheld federal funds if states and localities failed to comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The OEO became a powerful tool in the Johnson administration’s arsenal to “break the power of the states,” as historian Gary Gerstle put it. In Louisiana, for example, Shriver withheld federal poverty funding from the state until Governor John McKeithen withdrew his plans to stack a new state-level economic opportunity office with segregationists, political cronies, and white supremacists.
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The OEO’s power to circumvent the states enabled Shriver and his staff to direct money to some of the most economically distressed and segregated regions of the country. But the agency’s innovative powers, and its aggressive willingness to use them, generated opposition from conservatives who opposed the growth of the federal government.
Throughout his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon pledged to dismantle the OEO and shut down the local community action agencies (CAAs) that had been created to administer Johnson’s anti-poverty programs. Once he took office, Nixon gradually transferred programs out of the OEO to other federal agencies.
In January of 1973, just days after Johnson died of a heart attack, a newly reelected Nixon announced plans to terminate the OEO and eliminate federal funding for the Community Action Program. Philip Sanchez, Nixon’s own OEO director, announced his resignation in response.
Nixon quickly appointed conservative activist Howard Phillips as acting director. Phillips was an outspoken critic of the OEO and CAP, arguing that the War on Poverty was “conceptually flawed” and “based on the wrong notion that the poor should be treated as a class apart,” which he decried as “Marxist.” He immediately issued instructions to local CAAs to begin phasing out and planning for reductions-in-force.
But Nixon’s plan soon ran into legal obstacles. First, the federal employes’ union and the dense network of nearly 1,000 CAAs that had been established since the mid-1960s rose up to fight back. Community action agencies formed coalitions with local labor unions and branches of the American Federation of Government Employees to challenge Phillips’ actions in court. The president of the OEO’s Midwest Region V union, for example, joined with several CAAs to form the Coalition for the War on Poverty, which was one of the initial groups to seek an injunction stopping Phillips from proceeding with his plans.
It was only the first in a flurry of lawsuits against Phillips, directly, and in his capacity as acting director of the OEO, as well as against the administration more broadly.
In April 1973, several of the cases landed in front of District Judge William Jones, a Kennedy appointee. Jones’ decisions ended up dashing the hopes of Nixon and Phillips.
First, he ruled that their attempts to dismantle the OEO were “unauthorized by law, illegal and in excess of statutory authority.” While Nixon had proposed eliminating funds for the OEO and phasing out CAP in a budget proposal to Congress, legislators had never acted on the plan. That meant there was no legal authority to dismantle the OEO or abolish the Community Action Program. Congress had established them by statute in the Economic Opportunity Act, and therefore, only lawmakers—not the president—could reverse course. Judge Jones also found that Phillips had violated the Reorganization Act by failing to submit to Congress the plan required by the law before abolishing a federal agency. Further, he ruled that Phillips had violated the Economic Opportunity Act, which required 30 days’ notice for terminating employees.
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In addition to the suit by CAAs and the employees’ unions, four senators also sued, arguing that Nixon had never properly nominated Phillips for his position and that he had never been confirmed by the Senate. Once again, Judge Jones agreed, ruling that Phillips was illegally serving as Director of the OEO, and thus his actions were null and void. Phillips resigned his post shortly after. The New York Times editorialized that the entire affair demonstrated the Nixon’s administration’s “open contempt for Congress and the law. Mr. Phillips is simply doing the bidding of the president…. There has seemed to be complete failure on the part of the President and his associates to understand the true meaning of the rule of law.”
Nixon’s inability to dismantle the OEO stemmed from a series of both legal and political blunders. The president failed to follow the necessary legal steps to appoint Phillips or secure congressional approval for his plans to zero out CAP’s funding. Rather than going through the time-consuming process of winning Congress over to his vision, which also would have cost Nixon political capital, he decided to ignore the constitutional reality: Presidents cannot abolish federal agencies or withhold federal funds without the approval of Congress.
Demonstrating that it was his unwillingness to follow the law—not the goal itself—which thwarted Nixon, Ronald Reagan successfully abolished the OEO in 1981. He worked with Congress to pass a law that turned CAP into a block grant and shifted the OEO’s programs to other federal departments.
So far, Trump, and Musk—who is serving merely as a “special government employee” and acting as the leader of the “Department of Government Efficiency”—have followed Nixon’s playbook and ignored his lack of success.
If groups and individuals impacted by his proposed closures follow the playbook used by those who thwarted Nixon’s attempt to shutter OEO, Trump and Musk probably will run into the same fate. The Constitution is clear: Congress has the power of the purse, and when it creates something by law, the executive cannot unilaterally abolish it.
And this is not some abstraction or nicety of law. Alexander Hamilton explained why this principle is sacrosanct during the ratification debates over the Constitution. Hamilton warned that neither the executive nor the legislative branch could “singly” have control of the “sword and the purse.” Doing so would “destroy that division of powers on which political liberty is founded, and would furnish one body with all the means of tyranny”.
This is why the stakes in the fight over Trump and Musk’s actions are so high and why the process through which they try to achieve their goals matters so much. If presidents could just ignore Congress when it comes to spending money and eliminating government departments, it would be a recipe for the sort of despotic leadership that the Founders labored so hard to prevent.
Ryan LaRochelle is senior lecturer at the Cohen Institute for Leadership and Public Service at the University of Maine.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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