What I’m Working On: Professor Eloise Pasachoff, Appropriations and Administrative Law Scholar

“I say all the time to my students that it’s a lawyer’s job to take the mess of the world and explain it,” says Pasachoff, who in 2011 joined the Georgetown Law faculty after teaching first-year legal research and writing at Harvard Law School. “How to make the government function better is the thrust of what my work is about.”

Prior to joining academia, Pasachoff clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court, Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York and also worked as a litigation associate at a law firm in New York City. In April, she received the 2025 President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers, which celebrates Georgetown faculty for their excellence in research and teaching.

Now a topic frequently in the spotlight, federal spending has long been an academic interest for Pasachoff, who taught middle and high school English before becoming a lawyer and entered legal academia with an interest in education law.

“A lot of the way we do policymaking in America is actually through money,” she says. “Teaching at Georgetown, I realized that all of the questions about how federal dollars are used to effectuate policy in schools are the same questions that apply in any policy area.”

Below, Pasachoff discusses her recent work aimed at demystifying federal spending, where she finds scholarly inspiration and the advice she’d give to law students today.

What are you working on?

My essay “Appropriations Presidentialism” just came out in The Georgetown Law Journal Online. At the beginning of the new administration, my co-authors Matthew Lawrence of Emory Law and Zachary Price of UC Law San Francisco and I decided to write this paper to explain what was going on in terms of the president’s attempts to exert more spending power and to claim that he has the constitutional power to do so. One of our conclusions is that only Congress has the power of the purse: There’s just no substitute for Congress actually doing its constitutionally designed work, and there’s a limit on judicial oversight of federal spending.

In June, your report “GAO’s role in appropriations oversight” was published by the Brookings Institution. What does it look at?

That project is about the Government Accountability Office (also known as GAO), which plays a primary role in appropriations law. One of the things GAO does is publish appropriations law decisions evaluating the legality of spending decisions made by the executive branch. I was curious about what these decisions look like and how and why they are made. I worked with my research assistants Craig Schulman, L’25, and Angelene Superable, L’25, to build a dataset of the last 12 years of appropriations law decisions covering the Biden, Trump and Obama administrations. Our report summarizes key findings from this dataset. The report turned out to be timely, because GAO is currently doing a lot of investigations into the freezing of federal funds that my co-authors and I write about in “Appropriations Presidentialism.”

What are you working on next?

I’m working with a new set of research assistants to go back even further in GAO appropriations law decisions; eventually we’ll write up our findings on these decisions going back to the Clinton administration.

The bigger project I’m working on is my first book, which is about what happens after appropriations laws are signed. How do agencies know what to spend? Is it all controlled by the words of the bill, or do agencies get discretion — and who is in charge of making those decisions? This is a really opaque part of our administrative process, and it’s not something that there has really been much scholarship on.

To get a picture of how things work, I interviewed 65 people between April and December of last year, including those working at the Office of Management and Budget and in different roles at a variety of agencies, such as appropriations lawyers, key financial and budget officers and congressional liaisons. I also talked to Appropriations Committee staffers in both the House and Senate. I plan to continue interviewing in the year ahead, both to get into corners of the appropriations world I haven’t yet explored and to examine what has changed with the new administration.

Your area of expertise — how the executive branch oversees and implements appropriations law and federal grants — has received a lot of attention in recent months. Where do you find inspiration for your work?

I’m driven by curiosity and wanting to understand and improve things. I usually don’t come into a project with a fully fledged take on something. Instead, I see some practice unfolding and I don’t understand it or why it’s happening — so I do a lot of digging around to explain it and then think about how to make it function better.

You teach courses in budget law and the appropriations process as well as administrative law. What do you hope students take away from your classes?

It’s important to me that students think critically and evaluate their ideas. You can only figure out what you actually think by grappling seriously with counterarguments. I also think it’s important that students feel equipped to make change. While I don’t really teach about specific, substantive areas of policy, I focus on the tools to make government work. After taking my classes, I hope that students feel that they understand the levers to make change in whatever areas they want to.

Law students are often in a hurry. They think they need to come to law school knowing exactly what they want to do and then get started on their “real” job. But learning and developing are a lifelong journey. The process of building a life and a career is one in which you’re always growing.

This video was produced as part of the award ceremony at the 2025 Georgetown Spring Faculty Convocation: