This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 28th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Congress has delegated a good bit of the power of the purse to the executive.

The Trump administration has made use of an obscure old law to give tens of billions of dollars to farmers

harmed as a result of tariffs imposed by the president. Cato research fellow Will

Yeateman says Congress's response has been not to jealously guard its prerogatives

and its constitutionally delegated power over spending to step up to the trough to make sure

their farmers get a piece of the pie.

Last week, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced a second round of market facilitation program

payments to great patriot farmers as they're described by

President Trump to mitigate the harms wrought by the ongoing trade war.

This all started in early 2018 when Trump under utterly false

pretenses announced a wave of national security tariffs. These were supposedly again to further to protect our

national security. 25% on steel imports and 10% on aluminum imports. As a very brief aside just to expose how ridiculous this national security impetus is,

Cato, we are indeed engaged in litigation challenging this, but we produce two-thirds of our steel. Our number one importer by far is Canada, which by statute

is considered part of the US National Defence Base for planning purposes.

So that we have sort of a laughable

national security excuse. Nonetheless, it was imposed as anyone, as is always the case

there was a retaliation.

Canada, Mexico, the EU, China, Turkey,

a number of countries they imposed

tariffs, retaliatory tariffs on 800 goods, agricultural goods exported by America to the tune of

...