In a late Friday news dump, the White House announced plans to rescind some unspent funding for several agencies without congressional consent. On Tuesday, the independent Government Accountability Office said the move “subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.” It also underscores how unserious President Donald Trump has been about trying to correct the country’s ruinous fiscal trajectory.
The federal government’s largest programs are entitlements for seniors. Through the first 11 months of this fiscal year, which concludes on Wednesday, the federal government spent $1.51 trillion on Social Security and $976 billion on Medicare. The administration has promised to never cut those programs. “President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again),” the White House has boasted.
Entitlement spending occurs on autopilot. By law, Social Security and Medicare are separate from the annual budgeting process. Trump can point to this and claim his hands are tied.
When it comes to rescissions, however, Trump invents work-arounds for Congress-passed laws, making infinitesimal cuts to funding he previously approved and then gloating about taking “historic action to eliminate wasteful and harmful spending.”
Here’s how it works: Congress passed appropriations for this fiscal year in several bills, all of which Trump signed. They contained spending on immigration, climate, and racial and gender equity programs that Trump now wants to rescind. There’s a process to do that. The president submits a rescission request to Congress, which can then vote to approve or reject it.
Trump did it the right way once last year. He requested $9 billion in rescissions for public broadcasting and foreign aid. The Senate and House both approved clawing back that money. But once last year, and now again this year, he has submitted a request right at the end of the fiscal year when the full Congress is not in town to vote on it.
Once the fiscal year expires, so does the appropriation to spend the money. The administration calls this a “pocket rescission.” The GAO, Congress’s spending watchdog, calls it “illegal.”
The Constitution gives Congress control over spending. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 outlines the process for congressional approval of rescissions. Neither the Constitution nor the law allows the president to make these decisions unilaterally, which is, in effect, what happens when funding expires without a congressional vote.
Trump’s move is even more absurd when considering that his party controls both chambers of Congress. Rescission requests aren’t subject to the filibuster in the Senate and can be approved by a party-line vote. He could do this properly but has chosen to violate the law instead.
And for what? The $810 million in unspent funds is less than half of a tenth of 1 percent of this year’s deficit of over $2 trillion.
Trump is going out of the way to violate one law while feigning powerlessness to work with Congress and amend the laws actually driving the debt. For all the consternation about the U.S. DOGE Service, federal workforce turmoil and cutting fraud, this president continues to preside over reckless spending and record debt levels.
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