If Commerce retains and spends these funds, it violates the Miscellaneous Receipts Act and the Antideficiency Act.

This is yet another case of the Trump administration routing billions of dollars around Congress’s power of the purse. More here: www.justsecurity.org...

h/t @brendannyhan.bsky.social

But calling something a gift doesn’t make it one. To distinguish a payment from a “gift,” courts typically look to the payer’s intent.

In tax law, a gift requires “detached and disinterested generosity.” Paying $1–$2M to obtain a visa is a transaction, not generosity.

Under the Miscellaneous Receipts Act, any money paid to the fed. gov't must be deposited in the Treasury, unless Congress says otherwise.

Congress gave Commerce narrow authority to accept and spend gifts. The administration is trying to use it to evade the MRA by labeling these payments as “gifts.”

For background on why this model likely violates multiple federal spending laws, here’s my earlier analysis of the Japan deal: www.justsecurity.org/123478/trump...

Trump didn’t issue an EO implementing this—highly unusual for him. Admin lawyers may have seen an EO as too legally vulnerable and too likely to draw scrutiny, so they kept the MOU itself as low-visibility as possible.

Press reports sketched the broad mechanics, but big questions remained unanswered, like what counts toward the $350B by Jan 2029 and how that squares with Korea’s $20B/year investment cap. Korea published the MOU + press release that fill in those gaps: www.korea.kr/briefing/pre...

This setup lets the White House funnel billions in foreign financing into U.S. projects with no congressional appropriation, no statutory authority, and no treaty approval. It’s a foreign-funded parallel budget operating outside the Constitution and federal law altogether.

On the regular interpretive issues, they definitely ask the Hill staff about intent and talk to the implementing agency to understand how it’d play out (unless the requesting staff prohibit it, which is usually a bad idea).

But this is just intuition. I never encountered this scenario with CBO. A budget committee, CBO, or OMB alum would hopefully know.

My intuition is that CBO wouldn’t incorporate an NPRM if their GC concluded it was clearly illegal. Significant litigation risk alone wouldn’t cut it. And I’d bet they’d try not to put that conclusion in writing. The Dec. 2024 report says the 50% rule is “typically” applied, so they have flexibility

Yeah, IDK. It’s an interesting question, especially for an NPRM as the policy could still get factored in at 50%, but couldn’t be challenged in court.

Not sure it answers your exact question but in the ballpark: www.cbo.gov/publication/...