The White House’s temporary pause on trillions in federal spending could set up a court fight over executive authority and Congress’s control of the purse.

President Trump is impounding funds already legally authorized by Congress, in defiance of law, precedent, and arguably the Constitution.

On his first day in office, Trump declared that he would effectively ignore the law, and so TikTok lives. He appears to have engineered a short-term bailout for TikTok — whose app should have gone dark in the U.S. by now — after a wealthy donor supported the move and amid some belief that TikTok helped him get reelected.

Yet if the federal government is to return permanently to budgetary discipline — after the total absence of it for most of the last 50 years — fundamental reforms to the budget process are vital. The most important reform is to put the president back in the budgetary game by restoring his bargaining power with Congress.

The Trump Administration is undertaking what amounts to a wide-ranging assault on Congress's power of the purse, seeking instead to usurp authority over