President Donald Trump defied the intent of Congress with his recent executive order targeting the Wilson Center and five other federal agencies for which lawmakers had crafted legally binding charters and then allocated funds the White House was required to spend, legal experts and sources said.

In a fundraising email sent Monday, Wilson Center head Mark Green, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin, wrote that his organization had been given a “special charter” in 1968 when lawmakers created the think tank named after the 28th president.

Though representatives for the Wilson Center declined to comment for this article, legal experts said all federal entities created by Congress essentially have special charters because only the legislative branch can establish and close them.

Lawmakers, for decades, have used their authority to create all kinds of federal entities to perform a wide range of functions deemed in the country’s interests — and have backed up those organizations’ charters with annual funding under their constitutionally granted power of the purse. Legal experts and sources said that was why they expect federal judges to block Trump’s late Friday order targeting the Wilson Center and the other agencies.

Any litigation against the order will likely be based directly on the groups’ “ironclad” Congress-crafted charters, according to one legal official at an association that represents federal employees. The official said his group’s goal for affected federal workers at these entities was clear: “We want to get them back on the job.”

Other legal experts agreed with that assessment.

“Congress has the power to establish federal offices, big or small, and only Congress has the power to abolish them,” Michael Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said Wednesday. “If Congress establishes something in a bill and the president signs it, it’s the law of the land.

“The sitting president is obligated to respect the law, meaning he does not have the power to undo those agencies,” Gerhardt added. “And we better hope that’s the answer — otherwise, you won’t need Congress anymore. But this should be very clear as a matter of constitutional law.”

Legal experts and advocates for the six congressionally chartered entities expressed confidence in separate telephone interviews that Trump’s order would be overturned by the court system.

“Because it’s an end run around Congress, and that’s unconstitutional,” said David Seide, a senior counsel with the Government Accountability Project and former special counsel to Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. “The president can’t cancel these agencies. Congress has to.”

But a White House official on Tuesday described the cuts mandated in the president’s order as “absolutely necessary.”

And former Arizona gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake, who was named last month as a special adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media — one of the targeted entities — has also defended, both on air and online, the president order and the ensuing cuts she instituted at the agency.

“We have to reduce the size of the Federal Government,” she wrote Wednesday on social media. “We will lose this country if we remain in the kind of debt we’re in. It’s always difficult to cut people, but this is for the survival of our country.”

Lake, whom Trump also appointed to lead the Voice of America, which is overseen by the USAGM, even invoked a popular weight-loss drug in another post defending the order.

“The agency I am overseeing has a Billion-dollar budget. Past admins funneled half that money into grantees —with little to no transparency,” she said. “I sent letters to those grantees defunding them. We are going to be slimming this agency down drastically—like it’s on an Ozempic diet.”

‘Minimum presence’

The White House, late on March 14, released the surprise order, which calls on the heads of seven federal entities to immediately begin paring down their staffs and operations. The agencies included the Wilson Center, the USAGM, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and three others with congressionally mandated charters to focus on tasks including labor dispute mediation, homelessness and steering monies to low-income areas.

Notably, the order would not fully terminate those six agencies, as well as a seventh created by President Richard Nixon via an executive order to assist minority-owned businesses. Sources said leaving bare-bones operations in place appeared by design and aimed at complicating likely legal action from agency leaders and advocates.

“The non-statutory components and functions of the following governmental entities shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” Trump’s order states, “and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

The association legal official accused administration officials of wanting “to pretend they’re doing this legally.”

“But in practice, they’re going much further by preventing them from being able to function day-to-day. By not saying, ‘We’re killing these agencies outright,’ it does make things more legally messy for us,” the official said.

A lawsuit challenging the order filed this week by Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty — also part of the USAGM— contained several mentions of the word “unconstitutional.” A court filing links the agency’s congressionally crafted charter to its lawmakers-appropriated funding.

“In unmistakable terms, Congress has appropriated funds specifically for (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL) and expressly directed the United States Agency for Global Media to make those funds available to RFE/RL in the form of annual grants,” the filing document reads. “That agency is now refusing to disburse the appropriated funds on the basis that it is ending its ‘non-statutory’ functions.”

“But funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a statutory function of the United States Agency for Global Media,” the document continues. “Whether to disburse funds as directed by appropriations laws, and whether to make those funds available through grants as directed by the International Broadcasting Act, is not an optional choice for the agency to make. It is the law. Urgent relief is needed to compel the agency to follow the law.”

Agencies like the USAGM are considered federal organizations, unlike so-called Title 36 organizations, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the Military Order of the Purple Heart of the United States of America, the Society of American Florists and Ornamental Horticulturists, and others. According to a Congressional Research Service report, Title 36 entities “are typically incorporated first under state law, then request that Congress grant them a congressional or federal charter.”

“Chartered corporations listed in Title 36 are not agencies of the United States, and their charters only rarely assign the corporate bodies any governmental attributes,” the report states.

The agencies targeted by Trump in his Friday order were created as federal agencies by Congress.

“It’s safe to assume that no matter how a federal agency came to be, it got there with Congress authorizing a charter and approving funding,” said Gerhardt, the law professor at the University of North Carolina.

‘Beyond the scope’

Trump has for months made clear he was ready for a court fight over drastically scaling back many congressionally chartered organizations. During the 2024 campaign, he vowed that, if elected, he would bring back so-called impoundments, or actions by a president to refuse to spend funds appropriated by lawmakers or to redirect money to a part of the federal budget not intended for by Congress. With the 1974 law known as the Impoundment Control Act, Congress had moved to end such practices.

Trump, in a campaign video last year, said he intended to use the “long-recognized impoundment power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”

But sources said Trump’s executive order faces an impoundment problem because the federal agencies it targets have congressionally written-and-approved language — or charters — in the laws that created them, detailing specific functions for which lawmakers intended the appropriated funds be spent on.

“The order itself defies Congress’ intention of how the funding should be spent. A president doesn’t have the authority to not spend funds on things Congress spelled out in these charters (that) have to be funded,” said the legal official at the federal workers association. “The EO has a savings clause … but it’s how they’re going about this.”

“If you look at, for example, U.S. Agency for Global Media, there’s a statutory framework — a mandate, if you will — under which Congress basically has said, ‘You have to have broadcasts in certain areas,” the official said. “In the case of Radio Free Asia, which is within USAGM, the government created a nonprofit organization to broadcast to China and across Asia. But what they’ve done is cancel that contract. So they’re going beyond the scope of what their own EO says.”

William Ford, a policy advocate at the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, told CQ Roll Call in December that presidents have routinely complied with the 1974 law. Republican Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan opted to release congressionally appropriated funds during their terms, rather than deal with actual or threatened lawsuits from the Government Accountability Office.

“And so what Trump and his team are now contemplating doing is completely out of step with what every other president has done since 1974. It’s out of step with what they did during their first term. Their extreme arguments, in our view, don’t hold water,” William Ford said at the time.

Democratic lawmakers this week also condemned the Trump administration’s use of an earlier executive order to target the United States Institute of Peace, also a congressionally chartered federal agency, for “expected termination.”

Agents of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency took over the Institute of Peace building near the State Department on Tuesday, backed by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, the FBI and the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. The moves against the institute — some of whose board members have since filed a lawsuit seeking to halt what they call an illegal takeover — raised the ire of the top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees.

“Under the direction of President Trump, Elon Musk’s ‘DOGE’ has apparently engaged in a hostile takeover of U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a nonpartisan, independent nonprofit corporation established in law by Congress,” New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and New York Rep. Gregory W. Meeks said in a statement.

“If Musk’s dismantling of Congressionally authorized and funded agencies was not already enough,” the lawmakers added, “one would hope that his takeover of an independent non-profit organization is a clear line that we cannot allow to be crossed.”

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(Michael Macagnone and Paul M. Krawzak contributed to this report.)

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