Modernizing OMB

Restoring the Take Care Clause to Presidential Practice

Campaign Briefing: Fiscal Discipline, Constitutional Accountability, and Structural Oversight

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

April 14, 2026

I. The Most Powerful Office Nobody Talks About

Most Americans have never heard of the Office of Management and Budget. That is part of the problem.

OMB sits at the center of the executive branch’s financial and regulatory machinery. It prepares the President’s budget. It reviews regulations — through its subdivision, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) — before they take effect. It determines, in practice, whether congressionally appropriated funds will be released on time, in full, or at all. These are extraordinary powers. But they are not OMB’s powers. They are the President’s powers, delegated to OMB and exercised in the President’s name.

That distinction matters enormously. When appropriated funds are withheld, when disbursements are slow-walked, when regulations are quietly rewritten before they reach the public — those are presidential decisions, or the direct result of a presidential failure to prevent them. The career professionals inside OMB are doing the work their President assigns. The question this briefing addresses is what a President who takes the Constitution seriously will assign them to do — and what no President who honors the oath of office may ever direct them to do.

II. What OMB Was Built to Do — and What the Constitution Requires

OMB was built to be a technical compliance agent. Its job is to coordinate the executive branch’s budget process, ensure that agency spending aligns with congressional appropriations, and review regulations for consistency with the President’s stated agenda.

Those functions are legitimate and necessary. An executive branch of this size requires coordination. OMB provides it.

But the constitutional framework within which OMB operates is not optional. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution imposes on the President an affirmative, ongoing duty: he “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This is known as the Take Care Clause, and it is not a suggestion. It is a constitutional command. The laws the President must faithfully execute include every appropriations act that Congress passes. When Congress appropriates funds for a purpose, those funds must be disbursed for that purpose, at the time Congress intends, unless Congress itself provides otherwise.

The President has no constitutional authority to substitute his own policy preferences for the law as written. If the President believes a law is unwise, the Constitution provides the remedy: send a message to Congress, request amendment or clarification, make the public case for repeal, exercise the veto on future legislation. What the President may not do is direct OMB to treat a law as unenforceable because the administration disagrees with it. That is not faithful execution. It is the suspension of law by executive decree — precisely the abuse the Framers designed the Take Care Clause to prevent.

It is worth noting that OMB’s principal officers — the Director, Deputy Director, and the OIRA Administrator — are presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed. They are civil officers of the United States subject to impeachment by the House and removal by the Senate. An OMB Director who carries out a presidential order to withhold lawfully appropriated funds does not escape liability by following that order. “Following orders” is not a defense under American law. Both the issuer and the executor of an unlawful directive bear responsibility for it.

III. Presidential Responsibility and the Limits of Immunity

The most consequential constitutional crisis of the last decade grew directly from a presidential decision to use OMB to delay congressionally mandated foreign aid. The Government Accountability Office ruled that the withholding violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — the law Congress enacted specifically to prevent the executive branch from refusing to spend funds appropriated by law. The GAO stated the principle plainly: faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law. That is not merely a statutory conclusion. It is a restatement of the Take Care Clause itself.

A President who knowingly directs the withholding of appropriated funds — having been advised that doing so violates federal law, having taken the oath of office, and bearing the constitutional duty imposed by the Take Care Clause — has committed an abuse of public trust. In the historical understanding of the impeachment power, which derives not from criminal law but from the English parliamentary tradition of accountability for those who hold public office, such conduct meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor: a willful violation of a constitutional duty by a person entrusted with the highest office in the republic.

Some will invoke presidential immunity. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States established that Presidents enjoy presumptive immunity for official acts. But an act that violates a statute Congress enacted — one the President is constitutionally obligated to execute — cannot logically qualify as an official act performed within the scope of presidential authority. The Take Care Clause defines what official presidential action looks like: it is the faithful execution of the laws, not their suspension. An act in direct contravention of the Take Care Clause is not an official act. It is a repudiation of the constitutional condition on which the presidency rests. Immunity cannot logically follow.

IV. The Reform

This administration will publish and execute fixed timelines for fund disbursement following congressional appropriation. Once Congress has appropriated money for a purpose, the executive branch does not have discretion to sit on it. The law has spoken. The money moves. And if it does not move, the record will show precisely who gave the order to hold it.

We will restore and permanently require public access to Treasury Disbursement Logs and OMB apportionment records in real time, so that Congress and the public can track the flow of federal funds from appropriation to expenditure. Recent administrations have removed these records from public view. This administration will not. Transparency is not optional when the public’s money is at stake.

We will restrict OMB’s interpretation authority. All spending decisions must be tethered to published legislative text, reviewed in coordination with nonpartisan congressional budget staff, and documented in a way that is auditable after the fact. If OMB cannot show its work, its work does not count. If the administration disagrees with the law as written, it will say so publicly and take its case to Congress — not manage the disagreement through administrative delay.

We will appoint only career Senior Executive Service professionals to OMB’s administrative leadership roles, removing political influence from the enforcement of fiscal discipline. OMB’s job is compliance with the law, not the advancement of political strategy. Its leaders should be people who have spent careers mastering compliance — not people who arrived from a campaign and are prepared to use OMB as an instrument of policy by other means.

V. The Deeper Point

Every time appropriated funds are withheld from the programs they were designed to serve, real people bear the cost. Every time a regulation is returned from OIRA with changes that an agency’s professional staff did not make and cannot explain, the integrity of the rulemaking process is degraded. None of this happens without a President who permits it or directs it. The career professionals inside OMB and OIRA did not choose this role. A President assigned it to them.

The civil servants who staff OMB deserve a President who will not place them in the position of choosing between their oath to the law and their instructions from the White House. This candidate will not create that conflict, because this candidate will not issue those instructions.

Martin Ginsburg will take the same oath every President takes. He will mean it. The Take Care Clause is not a formality. It is the constitutional foundation of the entire relationship between the executive branch and the rule of law. A President who honors it will have no need to weaponize OMB. A President who violates it should answer for that violation — before Congress, before the courts, and before the American people.

OMB will be a tool of governance, not a gatekeeper of it. Its staff will execute the law as written. And the President will be the one who answers — publicly, in real time — if that does not happen. That is the difference between an executive branch that serves the law and one that substitutes itself for it. 

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN