Sunday, May 10, is the sixteenth day since Senator Sheldon Whitehouse filed an Anti-Deficiency Act referral with the Office of Management and Budget over the Trump administration's April 25 dismissal of three sitting members of the National Science Board, and the Office has issued no response. [1] The Anti-Deficiency Act prohibits federal officers from incurring obligations or expenditures in excess of available appropriations and requires referrals to be answered with a written report to Congress identifying corrective action; the statutory deadline for an initial response is, by the Comptroller General's standing guidance, thirty days. Day 16 places the OMB at the procedural mid-point with no public filing.

The paper's Saturday account read the silence as one of eight institutional clocks running into Day 15 without a single court filing — the absence-of-litigation pattern that has defined the Republic's institutional response to the second-term administrative actions across April and early May. Senator Murkowski's signaled Iran AUMF and Representative Tom Barrett's filed House AUMF, both of which would, if either reaches a floor, constitute the first concrete legislative action on the administration's executive war-making, are the first signs the pattern may break inside the coming week.

OMB Director Russell Vought's office did not return a request for comment Saturday. The National Science Board has not held a meeting since the dismissals. The thirteen-former-NSF-leader letter to Congress, which the paper covered Friday, has not been answered by the chairs of the House Science Committee or the Senate Commerce Committee. The Whitehouse referral remains, at Day 16, the document the institutional record will or will not eventually answer.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington