A second pocket rescission in 13 months shows Congress is losing control of its own spending power

On September 25, five days before the end of the fiscal year, the White House sent Congress a routine-looking document called a special message. It proposed canceling $810 million that lawmakers had already appropriated, spread across eleven accounts at six agencies. Because the message arrived so close to the September 30 deadline when that money would otherwise expire, the maneuver — known as a pocket rescission — let the administration withhold the funds through expiration no matter what Congress decided to do about the request. Four days later, the Government Accountability Office said, again, that this is illegal.

GAO's September 29 decision is narrow, careful and unambiguous. It takes no position on whether the targeted programs — refugee resettlement services, housing counseling, a Justice Department office that mediates racial conflict, migrant-student grants — deserve the money. Its complaint is procedural: the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 lets a president ask Congress to rescind funds and lets agencies withhold them for up to 45 days while Congress decides, but it does not let the executive branch run the clock past the money's expiration date and treat that as a cancellation Congress never voted on. "The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind," GAO wrote. Because this year's 45-day window runs past September 30, GAO concluded the funds have to stay available for obligation regardless of the pending request.

A mechanism built on a deadline

The Impoundment Control Act exists because Richard Nixon tried to simply not spend money Congress had appropriated, and Congress responded by writing itself a process: the president can propose a rescission, but unless Congress passes it within a defined congressional review period, the funds must go out the door. A pocket rescission inverts that design. By waiting until a handful of days remain before an account's money expires, the administration can trigger the 45-day clock knowing it cannot possibly finish before the funds lapse on their own — achieving, in effect, exactly the kind of unilateral cancellation the 1974 law was written to prevent, without ever winning a vote in Congress.

GAO has said this plainly before. Its 2018 opinion, cited again in the new decision, reached the identical conclusion. The Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget disagrees, arguing the statute never uses the words "pocket rescission" and therefore never bars one. OMB Director Russ Vought made the administration's position clear when he dismissed the finding on social media, writing that "GAO has become hyper partisan," and that Congress had tried to cut the agency's own funding over it. That is a dispute about whether a 52-year-old statute means what its drafters and GAO's lawyers, across administrations of both parties, have consistently said it means.

This is the second time in thirteen months

Roll Call reported that the administration used the identical tactic in August 2025, pocket-rescinding $4.9 billion in foreign assistance. That fight went to court. A district judge ordered the money obligated; the Supreme Court stayed that order and let the withholding continue while litigation proceeded — but, as an itemized analysis of this year's package notes, the justices were explicit that their order "should not be read as a final determination on the merits." Fourteen months later, no court has actually ruled on whether pocket rescissions are lawful. The administration has simply done it again, this time domestically, for less than a fifth of the dollar amount but across six times as many programs.

That repetition is the real story. A legally contested maneuver that survives one unresolved emergency appeal does not become settled law; it becomes a habit, repeated until it is treated as routine. Each cycle — propose, withhold, let GAO object, let the funds lapse before anyone can force the issue — shortens the distance between "disputed" and "normal."

A complaint that crosses party lines, without a remedy that does

What distinguishes this round from the last is who is objecting. The Boston Globe reported that Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, a Republican, joined House Budget Committee Democrat Brendan Boyle in rejecting the rescission, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he expects the courts, not Congress, to settle it. Collins went further than a routine statement of concern.

"OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding," Collins said in a statement calling the package "a usurpation of Congress's appropriations powers."

That is the chair of the Senate committee that writes spending bills, from the president's own party, accusing his budget office of an unconstitutional power grab. It changes the politics of the dispute but not, so far, its trajectory. Congress controls the one lever that would actually stop this — it could pass a rescission bill or refuse to, forcing the money out under the existing statute's plain terms, or amend the Impoundment Control Act to close the loophole outright. It has done neither. The House is in recess until after the midterms, and a floor vote condemning the maneuver would not change the legal posture even if it passed.

• $567.4 million of the package comes from a single account: HHS refugee and entrant assistance.
• Smaller cuts hit housing counseling at HUD ($56.1 million), migrant-student grants at Education ($24.9 million), and a Justice Department office on community relations ($15 million).
• All eleven accounts share one trait: their budget authority was set to expire September 30, the same day the 45-day congressional review window was still running.

Why a dispute over refugee funding is a dispute about the Constitution

It is tempting to read this as one more skirmish over immigration spending, since the largest single cut targets services for refugees, asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors — a politically convenient target for an administration that has made restricting that population a defining priority. But GAO's objection has nothing to do with the merits of refugee funding, and neither should the public argument. The procedural question GAO raised would apply with equal force if a future administration, of either party, used the same 45-day arithmetic to zero out a defense program, a border-security account, or a climate initiative five days before the fiscal year's end. The Impoundment Control Act was written as a general check on executive discretion over appropriated money; a workaround that defeats it defeats it for everyone, permanently, regardless of which party controls the White House when it gets used next.

That is also why the absence of a court ruling matters more than the dollar figure. GAO's opinions carry no enforcement power of their own — it can refer a case to the Justice Department or, in principle, sue, but it has not done so in either the 2025 or 2026 instance. Without a judicial decision on the merits, the administration faces no actual consequence for ignoring GAO's reading, and the practice is left to calcify through repetition rather than through any affirmative legal victory. A governance mechanism that depends on a president's voluntary compliance with an agency he can simply call "hyper partisan" is not much of a mechanism at all.

Congress wrote the Impoundment Control Act specifically because it did not trust presidents to spend what it appropriated. Fifty-two years later, the test of whether that law still functions is not whether GAO keeps writing careful decisions explaining why a maneuver is illegal — it has done that twice now, in nearly identical terms, fourteen months apart. The test is whether anyone with standing to act is actually willing to force the issue into a court that will rule on the merits, rather than letting each unresolved rescission harden the precedent for the next one.