IMPOUNDMENT

n. incarceration, confinement; confiscation, seizure

Impoundment may also refer to an obstruction, such as a dam or reservoir or an automobile towed for parking violations.Impoundment is the refusal of presidents of the United States to spend money that has been appropriated by the United States Congress. All of the presidents up to Richard Nixon have used this power, which is regarded as inherent to the office. President Thomas Jefferson first used the power of impoundment in 1801. He refused to spend appropriated funds when he impounded $50,000 for United States Navy gunboats. He said that "[t]he sum of fifty thousand dollars appropriated by Congress for providing gun boats remains unexpended. The favorable and peaceable turn of affairs on the Mississippi rendered an immediate execution of that law unnecessary." In keeping with his efforts to reduce the size of the debt, he left the funds for the ships unspent for over a year.
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Noun
1. placing private property in the custody of an officer of the law
(synonym) impounding, internment, poundage
(hypernym) seizure
(hyponym) drug bust, drugs bust
(derivation) impound, attach, sequester, confiscate, seize
(classification) law, jurisprudence

A traditional budgeting procedure by which the President of the United States once could prevent any agency of the Executive Branch from spending part or all of the money previously appropriated by Congress for their use. He would accomplish this, in essence, by an executive order that would forbid the Treasury to transfer the money in question to the agency's account. (The Constitution provides that no money from the Treasury can be spent without a specific Congressional appropriation , but it is silent on the question of whether all money appropriated by Congress actually has to be spent.) All American presidents since John Adams asserted the right to impound appropriated funds , and presidents often used this as a way of making relatively small cuts in Federal spending on programs that they deemed unwise or unnecessary, despite occasional murmurings of dissatisfaction from Congressmen annoyed by the cancellation or trimming of some of their pet pork-barrel projects . In 1973-1974, however, President Nixon made unusually large-scale use of impoundment in his efforts to fight the unusually serious inflationary pressures of the time by trimming back the budget deficit . President Nixon impounded nearly $12 billion of Congressional appropriations , which represented something over 4% of the spending Congress had appropriated for the coming fiscal year. Congressional leaders, who were already up in arms against the Nixon White House because of the Watergate scandal, rebelled against the implicit presidential rebuke of their judgment and authority over spending decisions posed by such large-scale impoundment. In 1974, Congress passed legislation purporting to make the old practice of presidential impoundment illegal and legally requiring the Executive Branch to spend every last penny that would ever be appropriated for it by Congress in the future. The administration denied that Congress had the constitutional authority to over-ride the President's control over the executive branch agencies in this manner, but a Federal Court eventually upheld the Congress's position on this matter, and the new Ford Administration chose to acquiesce in this lower court ruling rather than to further antagonize the already hostile Congress with an appeal to the Supreme Court.
[See also: sequestration ]

A body of water or sludge confined by a dam, dike, floodgate, or other barrier.