Tag: emergency powers

‘Emergency’ Spending Is Out of Control

Emergencies are, by definition, unexpected and urgent situations requiring immediate action—except in Congress, where the term is increasingly used to justify spending decisions that should be part of the normal budget process.

Congress has authorized more than $12 trillion in emergency spending over the past three decades, according to a report released in January by the Cato Institute. About half of that total was spent in direct response to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, but much of the other half was used for purposes that strain the definition of emergency.

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Congress Wastes Billions With Bogus Emergency Declaration

What constitutes an emergency? According to Congress’ new spending package, research equipment and facilities for the National Science Foundation is an emergency. So are the 2024 Democratic National Committee convention and the Republican National Committee convention. So is NASA space exploration. 

By classifying all these line items as emergencies, Congress can get hundreds of millions of taxpayer funding for them with reduced oversight.

Congress’ latest spending package, released this week, is hardly the first time obviously nonemergency projects have been given this special funding designation. According to a January report from the Cato Institute, Congress has approved over $12 trillion in spending for emergencies over the past three decades, making up around 1 in 10 federal budget dollars spent—more than both Medicaid and veterans programs combined.

How is this possible? Much of it comes down to lax rules that let lawmakers classify regular spending projects as “emergencies.” 

“Congress has complete discretion in designating spending for emergencies because what qualifies as an emergency is subject to interpretation,” Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett wrote in Cato’s report. While the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has laid out several criteria that emergency spending is supposed to meet, Boccia and Lett note that “the current process lacks a mechanism to evaluate whether an emergency provision meets the OMB’s test, which means that anything can count as emergency spending.”

Once spending gets earmarked as an emergency, it isn’t subjected to typical caps on discretionary spending, allowing Congress to rack up costs with little accountability. “Unfortunately, over the course of the last 30-some years, Congress took what was designed to be a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ escape valve, and they’ve turned it into a major source of funding for federal activity,” David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, tells Reason.”It’s just a way for [Congress] to avoid fiscal consequences. And that’s part of how we got where we are.”

“Emergencies are, by definition, unexpected and urgent situations requiring immediate action—except in Congress, where the term is increasingly used to justify spending decisions that should be part of the normal budget process,” Eric Boehm pointed out in the April 2024 issue of Reason magazine, “Because emergency spending bypasses some of the scrutiny applied to the normal budgetary process, it has become a convenient way for lawmakers and presidents to hike spending—and add to the national debt.”

Cato’s report highlights some particularly egregious examples of this exact phenomenon, including $600 million earmarked for replacing aircraft used in weather forecasting, $347 million for prison construction and detention costs, and $278 million to speed up the building process for a single research center.

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The U.N. Is Planning To Seize Global ‘Emergency’ Powers With Biden’s Support

In September 2024, less than two months before the next U.S. presidential election, the United Nations will host a landmark “Summit of the Future,” where member nations will adopt a Pact for the Future. The agreement will solidify numerous policy reforms offered by the U.N. over the past two years as part of its sweeping Our Common Agenda platform.

Although there are numerous radical proposals included in the agenda, perhaps none are more important than the U.N. plan for a new “emergency platform,” a stunning proposal to give the U.N. significant powers in the event of future “global shocks,” such as another worldwide pandemic.

Many of the details of the U.N. emergency platform were laid out in a March 2023 policy paper titled “Strengthening the International Response to Complex Global Shocks — An Emergency Platform.” In the paper, the U.N. secretary-general writes, “I propose that the General Assembly provide the Secretary-General and the United Nations system with a standing authority to convene and operationalize automatically an Emergency Platform in the event of a future complex global shock of sufficient scale, severity and reach.”

Once triggered, the emergency platform would give the U.N. the ability to “actively promote and drive an international response that places the principles of equity and solidarity at the centre of its work.” The U.N. would bring together the “stakeholders” of the world, including academics, governments, private sector actors, and “international financial institutions” to ensure there is a unified, global response to the crisis.

The emergency platform would also give the United Nations the power to “Ensure that all participating actors make commitments that can contribute meaningfully to the response and that they are held to account for delivery on those commitments.”

In other words, the United Nations would be given unprecedented authority over the public and private sectors of huge swaths of the world, all in the name of battling a yet unknown crisis.

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Rule by Decree: The Emergency State’s Plot to Override the Constitution

We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

COVID-19, for example, served as the driving force behind what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used COVID-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:

“Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

“Federal executive officials entered the act too.  Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.  They threatened to fire noncompliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement.  Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

“While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent.  Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few—but hardly all—of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation.”

Yet while the government’s (federal and state) handling of the COVID-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., it was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.

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Emergency rule emergency? How authorities are invoking crises to exercise unprecedented power

Days after the 2008 election, Rahm Emanuel famously issued what’s known today as Rahm’s rule.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Emanuel, then chief of staff to President-elect Barack Obama. “And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Emanuel argued the 2008 financial crisis afforded the Obama administration a window to promptly address problems that had previously been deferred indefinitely pending the long-term ripening of political consensus.

Fourteen years later, Emanuel’s now-famous phrase on crises has become standard practice in Washington, D.C., as officials in power regularly use what they deem “emergencies”— from viral pandemics to purported threats to democracy — to push controversial measures and restrictions on civil liberties that otherwise might fail due to pushback.

This trend was recently highlighted by President Biden declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over while still maintaining the national emergency declaration on the pandemic as his administration used COVID-19 to justify major executive action.

“The pandemic is over,” Biden recently told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

However, the Biden administration has yet to lift the public health emergency that was first declared in 2020 for COVID-19. That declaration has allowed the White House to use the National Emergencies Act to activate special executive powers, such as restricting hours of operations at U.S. ports of entry.

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Canada wants to make financial aspects of Emergencies Act permanent

Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland wants to make permanent the invasive financial surveillance system introduced as part of the “Emergencies Act” to crush the civil liberties protests.

Freeland had announced the initial powers earlier this week to freeze the bank accounts of those who support the protests.

“As of today, all crowdfunding platforms, and the payment service providers they use, must register with FINTRAC and must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada),” Freeland said at the time. “This will help mitigate the risk that these platforms receive illicit funds; increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by FINTRAC; and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement into these illegal blockades.

“This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades. We are today serving notice, if your truck is being used in these illegal blockades your corporate accounts will be frozen.”

Under the Emergencies Act, banks are required to freeze accounts without the need for a court order.

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Biden Quietly Extends the Federal National Emergency Declaration Related to COVID Beyond Termination Date of March 1st – Provides No End Date

The man-made crisis continues.

Old senile Joe Biden sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi noting that he is extending the National Emergency related to COVID well beyond its current termination date set for March.

The Conservative Treehouse reports:

Joe Biden informed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that he intends to extend the federal National Emergency declaration beyond its termination date in March. [STATUTE HERE]

By statute the State of a National Emergency expires one year after initial declaration. That meant the COVID National Emergency declaration was scheduled to end March 1st.  However, the statute allows the extension if the executive office informs the legislative branch within the 90-day window prior to expiration.

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Trudeau To Unleash Never-Before-Used ‘Emergency Powers Act’ To Counter Protests As US-Canada Bridge Reopens

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has learned that Prime Minister Trudeau “will inform the provinces he will invoke the Emergencies Act to give the government extra powers to deal with the protests across the country. But in a meeting with the Liberal caucus, the PM said there were no plans to deploy the military.” 

The move follows a meeting Sunday of the federal cabinet and its Incident Response Group (IRG).

Trudeau tweeted late Sunday that the IRG discussed “further actions the government can take to help end the blockades and occupations.”

Earlier that day, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair told CBC’s Rosemary Barton Live that the federal government has discussed invoking special emergency powers to deal with ongoing protests in Ottawa.

Blair described the attitude around invoking the Emergencies Act as “appropriate caution” rather than “reticence.”

As CBC concludes, the law gives the federal government carte blanche to cope with a crisis, including the ability to enact emergency powers that allow it to prohibit travel within a specified area or remove personal property, while imposing fines or jail time on people contravening new orders.

This is basically the ability to unleash ‘selective’ martial law on Canadians.

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