In 1973–74, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities held nationally televised hearings that exposed the Watergate scandal and the Nixon administration’s abuses of power. 

Those investigations ultimately led to articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee, the Supreme Court ordering the release of White House tapes, and President Nixon’s resignation. 

Watergate also led to major ethics and transparency reforms—including the Federal Election Campaign Act, which established the Federal Election Commission to regulate campaign finance, and the Ethics in Government Act, which required financial disclosures from government officials and established the role of independent counsel to investigate government misconduct—demonstrating how Congressional oversight can reshape American democracy.

💡Why does this matter? When Congress exercises robust, fact-driven oversight, it provides a powerful check on executive branch misconduct. When it doesn’t—whether due to political alignment with the President, executive branch resistance, information overload and resource constraints, or institutional dysfunction—that accountability gap can have serious consequences for democratic governance.

One of the most significant ongoing battles between Congress and the executive branch is over spending. 

The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse: the exclusive authority to decide how federal money is spent. But presidents have sometimes tried to get around this by simply refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated.

In the early 1970s, President Nixon asserted broad authority to “impound” (refuse to spend) Congressional appropriations on a massive scale—at one point withholding more than a third of all domestic discretionary spending in a single year. 

Congress fought back by passing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA), which 

• Requires the president to seek Congressional approval before withholding funds
• Allows the president to request a temporary “deferral” or permanent “recission” of appropriated funds
• Requires Congress to approve rescissions within 45 days, or the funds must be released

How has this played out since then? The ICA has been used across administrations of both parties. Presidents from Ford through Obama proposed roughly $91 billion in rescissions; Congress approved about $25 billion. During President Trump’s second term, the dynamic has intensified. The administration both pursued formal rescissions—winning congressional approval for $9 billion in cuts in May 2025, the first successful rescission bill since 1992—and went beyond the ICA’s formal process, with GAO finding unlawful impoundments at multiple agencies. The administration also attempted “pocket rescissions”: transmitting rescission requests near the end of the fiscal year so that funds expire before Congress can act on them. GAO has concluded this violates the ICA; courts have begun to weigh in, but the question is not yet resolved.

Congress’s response has been mixed. The Republican-controlled majority approved the administration’s rescission package. Democrats on the Appropriations Committees have documented hundreds of billions in blocked funding—but the majority has not moved to compel release of those funds or to close the pocket rescission loophole the ICA currently leaves open.

💡Why does this matter? Congressional power is not static. It expands when Congress asserts itself, and it contracts when Congress defers to the executive or fails to enforce its own authorities. The impoundment fight is a vivid example of why institutional vigilance matters. The rules Congress sets—or acquiesces in—today will shape the power it has tomorrow.

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates both the power of nonpartisan oversight institutions and the limits of congressional follow-through. When Congress passed major COVID-19 relief packages beginning in 2020, it included a mandate for GAO to monitor federal COVID response—an explicit recognition that independent oversight would be essential given the speed and scale of spending.

GAO did exactly what it was designed to do:

It documented problems in real time—including the Department of Labor’s failure to accurately report the number of individuals actually receiving unemployment benefits, as opposed to merely counting claims processed. GAO made specific recommendations for better data collection and transparency. Then, in June 2022, GAO took the unusual step of adding the entire Unemployment Insurance (UI) system to its High Risk List—a formal designation reserved for federal programs most vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement.

In September 2023, GAO released the findings of a deeper investigation: using statistical sampling and econometric modeling, it estimated that pandemic UI fraud likely totaled between $100 billion and $135 billion—representing 11 to 15 percent of all UI benefits paid during the pandemic. As of May 2023, states had recovered only about $1.2 billion of that amount.

The congressional response showed both the system working and its limits. GAO’s findings directly prompted oversight hearings in the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Oversight Committee. In May 2023, the House passed the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act on a bipartisan vote—a bill that would have incentivized states to recover fraudulent overpayments, extended the statute of limitations for fraud prosecution from five to ten years, and strengthened future program integrity controls. The Senate never took it up, and the bill died at the end of the 118th Congress.

💡Why does this matter? Once again, this example captures the paper-vs.-practice tension at the heart of Congressional powers. 

• GAO performed its institutional role exactly as designed—identifying a massive problem, quantifying it rigorously, and giving Congress the information it needed to act. 
• Congress only partially responded: hearings were held, a bill passed the House. But without Senate action, the legislation went nowhere. The institutional capacity to identify the problem existed. The political will to fully address it did not. That gap—between knowing what needs to be done and actually doing it—is where Congressional accountability most often breaks down.