Pocket Rescission Lets the White House Erase Your Vote on Spending

On September 25, President Donald Trump sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson reporting eleven proposed rescissions totaling eight hundred ten million dollars in congressionally approved spending, according to the White House. The package targets refugee assistance, migrant education programs, a Justice Department office focused on racial tensions, minority business grants, housing counseling, and other programs the administration describes as wasteful or harmful. The largest single cut, five hundred sixty-seven million dollars from a Health and Human Services refugee services account, drew the most attention. The move is known as a pocket rescission, and it is only the second such move in roughly half a century. The programs are not the real story here. The timing is.

How a pocket rescission works

Congress gave the White House a process for canceling approved funds. Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a president who wants to rescind appropriated money must send Congress a special message, and Congress gets forty-five days to act on the request. The notice arrived with about five days left in the federal fiscal year, which ends September 30. A pocket rescission is a proposed cancellation that lands so late in the year that the money expires before Congress can use its review window. In effect, the clock runs out before the legislature gets its say.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress's nonpartisan watchdog, says pocket rescissions are not allowed. In its most recent decision on the question, from 2018, the GAO concluded that the Impoundment Control Act does not permit withholding funds through their expiration date. A pocket rescission, the GAO says, lets a president effectively shorten the period Congress set for the money, which bypasses Congress's power of the purse. The power of the purse is the constitutional principle that the legislature, not the executive, controls federal spending.

The watchdogs and the courts disagree with the White House

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the move illegal, according to Reuters, describing it as the latest attempt by the Office of Management and Budget to undermine what she called Congress's constitutional power of the purse. Collins said she would work with colleagues to address the action. It is worth noting that the objection comes from the president's own party, from the person whose committee wrote the spending bills in the first place.

The White House disagrees with that reading. Its announcement framed the package as a historic step against wasteful spending and said the president is using authorities under the Impoundment Control Act that had gone neglected for decades. The dispute over the pocket rescission is not new. The Supreme Court last year declined to block the administration from using the same approach to withhold four point nine billion dollars in congressionally approved foreign aid while litigation continued. So the legal fight over whether a president can use a pocket rescission is still open, even as the GAO's answer is a flat no.

This is about your vote, not these programs

Here is the part that should matter to every voter, regardless of party. Congress already voted on this money. Both chambers approved it, and the president signed it into law. A pocket rescission does not ask Congress to vote again. It simply runs out the clock. That is why the GAO's objection is about process, not programs. If a president can shrink Congress's review window to zero by waiting until the last week of September, then the appropriations process becomes optional whenever the White House finds it inconvenient.

You can support the cuts and still oppose the method. The budget debate Congress was elected to have is replaced by a letter Congress does not have time to answer. Compare that with how policy usually changes: the Senate passed a college sports bill this week through a real vote, seventy-seven to twenty-two, after open debate and amendments, and the college sports bill's path through Congress shows the normal legislative process at work. The EPA's power plant repeal, for all its controversy, went through formal rulemaking with a public comment period. Those are the slow, annoying, constitutional ways to change policy. A pocket rescission skips all of them.

The midterms are five weeks away

That brings us to November 3, when voters choose a new Congress in the midterm elections. The power of the purse only means something if the people holding it answer to voters, and right now the purse is being emptied by letter. Whatever you think of the programs on the chopping block, the question on the ballot is simpler: who gets the final say on how the country spends its money? If the answer is supposed to be the Congress you elect, then the process protecting that answer deserves defending, even when you like the outcome.

The funds expire when the fiscal year ends. The precedent set by this pocket rescission does not.

Sources: White House announcement of the September rescissions package; GAO WatchBlog on pocket rescissions; Reuters reporting on the withholding and the legal dispute.