Redding TV News Quotes Professor Larson on Federal Spending Freeze

Professor Carlton F.W. Larson spoke to Redding’s KRCR ABC7 about President Donald Trump’s order to freeze federal spending.

The order’s statement that the administration is reviewing all spending to make sure it aligns with the Trump administration’s recent executive actions is “completely inconsistent with the idea of a law,” Larson said.

“The law isn’t what Trump wants. The law is what Congress said ‘this is what we want to spend money on,’ and to faithfully execute that you have to do that, and you don’t get to push money forward because you like it and push other money back because you don’t like it. That’s simply unconstitutional." 

KRCR also explored ongoing confusion in late January about whether the order had or had not been officially rescinded, given conflicting messaging from the administration.

Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law Carlton Larson's research interests focus on constitutional law and legal history. One of the nation’s leading authorities on the law of treason, Professor Larson is the author of the ABA Silver Gavel Award finalist books The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019) and On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020).