The White House is signaling it may soon invoke a little-known and legally untested power to try to cancel billions of dollars in federal spending, as President Trump’s top aides look for novel ways to reconfigure the budget without obtaining the explicit approval of Congress.
Under the emerging plan, the Trump administration would wait until closer to Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, to formally ask lawmakers to claw back a set of funds it has targeted for cuts. Even if Congress fails to vote on the request, the president’s timing would trigger a law that freezes the money until it ultimately expires.
The idea is known as a pocket rescission, and it has been invoked only in limited circumstances over the past half-century. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan oversight body that reports to Capitol Hill, ruled during the first Trump administration that pocket rescission is illegal, citing Supreme Court precedent as it reversed its previous stance that the law may permit the power’s use.
But Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has increasingly brandished the maneuver as an ultimatum to Congress, warning the White House may test the limits of its authority to act unilaterally unless Congress hastens its work to cut spending. Mr. Vought has said pocket rescission could also allow the administration to achieve some of the deep cuts identified by the Department of Government Efficiency.
If the White House proceeds, its actions could touch off a high-stakes legal battle over the power of the purse, which the Constitution affords to Congress. Mr. Vought at times has openly courted this sort of showdown, as he broadly asserts that the president wields expansive powers over federal spending.
“It’s a provision that has been rarely used, but it is there,” Mr. Vought said in little-noticed remarks on pocket rescission during a recent appearance on CNN. “And we intend to use all of these tools.”
Mr. Vought teased the idea again on a call with reporters earlier in June, describing pocket rescission as a tool to cut spending “without having to get an affirmative vote” from Congress. Appearing at a House hearing that same week, Mr. Vought stressed to lawmakers there were “all manner of provisions” available to the president to enact his fiscal vision.
“The whole point of the law is to make sure that funds are prudently obligated,” said Bobby Kogan, a budget aide under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is now serving as senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning group. “This would deny that.”
Mr. Vought’s claims illustrate the widening chasm between Democrats in Congress and the White House over the future of the nation’s budget. The feud originated in the early days of Mr. Trump’s term, when he froze nearly all federal spending in a move that foreshadowed the aggressive tactics he would employ to conform the budget to his political views.
The top two Democrats overseeing appropriations — Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Senator Patty Murray of Washington — estimated in a recent report that the White House had already slowed or frozen delivery of at least $425 billion in funding enacted by Congress. The delays have affected money meant to facilitate cancer research, fund child care centers and help communities recover from natural disasters, according to the analysis, which the White House contests.
“O.M.B. Director Vought presumes he can go around the back of the president, the Congress and the American people to assert a unilateral power over spending for himself above all others,” Ms. DeLauro said in a statement.
Watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office have opened more than three dozen investigations to determine if some of Mr. Trump’s spending actions are illegal. On Monday, the Government Accountability Office determined that the administration broke the law when it halted federal funding for libraries as part of the president’s plan to curtail regulatory overreach.
The oversight office classified that interruption as an illegal impoundment, which is restricted under a 1970s law enacted in response to former President Richard M. Nixon, who repeatedly sought to block the disbursement of money enacted by Congress. Under Mr. Trump, the White House previously denied similar charges, accused the accountability office of partisan bias and maintained the law itself is unconstitutional.
Still, Mr. Vought has also sought ways to use the anti-impoundment law to his advantage.
Like many of his predecessors, Mr. Trump can invoke another part of the statute to ask Congress to cancel money that lawmakers have already approved. The highly orchestrated process, known as rescission, permits the president to identify money that he wants to revoke, then ask the House and Senate to vote to claw the funds back.
Mr. Trump availed himself of that power when he sent Congress a package outlining $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting, which the House adopted last week. Under the law, his official rescission request freezes the money for 45 days while lawmakers debate it, and if they fail to act on the request, the funds must be spent as intended.
But the White House has suggested it may further try to leverage this timeline by submitting the rescission request closer to the end of the fiscal year. Even if Congress does not vote on it within the 45-day window, the funds may be canceled anyway, since unspent money does not typically roll over into the next fiscal period.
Mr. Trump’s aides have described this move as a pocket rescission, and signaled they could invoke it if lawmakers do not deliver the magnitude of cuts sought by the White House, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe continuing deliberations.
Mr. Vought floated the idea of pocket rescission while serving as budget chief in Mr. Trump’s first term. Mark Paoletta, the general counsel of the budget office, argued its legality in a 2018 letter viewed by The New York Times, which claimed that the law “places no limit on how late in the fiscal year” the president may begin the process.
The concept emerged under President Gerald R. Ford, who proposed multiple rescissions to Congress in 1975, some of which arrived in the final days of that fiscal year. Lawmakers acted on only some of his requests before time ran out, and as a result, about $10 million that Mr. Ford targeted for rescission — but that Congress had not voted on — essentially expired anyway, according to congressional records.
Studying the matter at the time, the Government Accountability Office said the incident exposed a “major deficiency” in the recently enacted law meant to constrain the president on spending. It recommended a series of changes to the anti-impoundment rules to prevent the problem from occurring again. Congress never adopted any of the recommendations.
The office explicitly inveighed against the idea more than 40 years later. In a 2018 report requested by Democrats, the nonpartisan watchdog found that the law “does not permit the withholding of funds through their date of expiration.”
Matthew Lawrence, a professor at Emory University and an expert on administrative law, said the conclusion underscored the text and purpose of the anti-impoundment law, which “is to prevent unilateral executive refusals to spend.”
But Mr. Vought and his allies still have sought to use earlier reports from the accountability office to justify their new threats to cancel funds. In a paper issued last month, the Center for Renewing America, a conservative nonprofit founded by Mr. Vought, said decades of congressional inaction meant that a pocket rescission “remains consistent” with the law.
“A rescission is a viable tool for carrying out the broader political mandate to curb unnecessary spending,” a senior adviser for the group wrote.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
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