President Trump’s Real Emergency

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — Prior to President Trump, only two Presidents have initiated use of the special emergency authority [U.S. Code Title 10, Section 2808] to transfer un-obligated military construction money to new projects without Congressional approval.

The original legislation, passed in 1981, at the height of the Cold War, was titled “Construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or national emergency,” when the country was fearful of a devastating nuclear “first strike” from the Soviet Union.

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