ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY
The clock ran out on Congress before Congress noticed the clock.
Friday, September 25. The White House announced it is canceling $810 million in congressionally approved spending. The instrument is a pocket rescission. The fiscal year ends September 30. The House is not scheduled to return until after the November midterms.
Five days. No quorum. That is the whole story, and the people screaming about it understand it perfectly.
Start with where the money was going. $567 million — the largest share by far — came out of Health and Human Services programs that funded non-governmental organizations supporting refugees, asylees and other non-citizens. $25 million out of education programs for migrant students; the White House said those dollars underwrote “an LGBT youth summit” and “Therapy for Latinx workshops.” $70 million out of what the administration labeled “Woke International Education” — funding the White House said brings foreign students and faculty into the United States and in some cases paid for doctoral dissertations on “queer and trans community building in foreign countries.”
The rest of the list: the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, the Civil Rights Act subagency nicknamed “America’s Peacemaker.” A business development program for minority entrepreneurs. Housing and Urban Development counseling services. The HHS Office of Minority Health. HHS research the administration called “overfunded and unaligned” and “outright harmful and blatantly ideological.” And a program that hands debt relief to foreign countries that adopt climate change policies.
The White House also noted, pointedly, that several of the recipient organizations are led by former officials in the Obama administration. Make of that what you will. We did.
“President Trump is committed to utilizing all possible tools to cut wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens,” the statement read. It called the rejected money “the most harmful government spending.”
Now the mechanism. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — Congress’s revenge on Richard Nixon for sitting on money it had appropriated — gives Congress 45 days to accept or reject a White House decision to withhold funds. OMB’s argument is narrow and, so far, undefeated: the Act does not explicitly forbid a president from rescinding funds near the end of a fiscal year. Send the request with fewer than 45 days left on the fiscal calendar and there is no clock left to run. OMB Director Russ Vought has made that argument repeatedly and has not blinked.
Then the howling.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, facing a tough re-election campaign, called the move “unlawful.” She said OMB “intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law.” She said OMB “does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.” She said she will “work with my colleagues to address these illegal actions,” and cited the Government Accountability Office’s conclusion that “pocket rescissions are unlawful and not permitted by the Impoundment Control Act.”
Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and vice chair of Appropriations, called it a “theft from the American people.” Her line on Vought: “your votes don’t count, and your laws are optional.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the administration is “illegally stripping nearly $1 billion in critical funding that supports kids, K-12 students, small businesses, and health and clean air research.” Senate Democrats, he said, will “challenge Trump’s illegal cuts.”
GAO wrote last year that the device itself is illegal, warning that a pocket rescission “could allow a president to avoid spending the money regardless of whether Congress approves the rescission request,” and would “cede Congress’s power of the purse.” A Congressional Research Service summary noted GAO has likened the maneuver to a line-item veto — a power the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.
Every word of that is an accusation, not a holding. No court has ruled Friday’s package illegal. Keep the two categories separate, because the people quoted above are counting on you not to.
And there is precedent, which is the part they hate most. Last year Trump deployed the first pocket rescission in nearly 50 years against $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, including $3.2 billion from USAID and $322 million from USAID’s State Democracy fund. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the administration in September 2025, citing the president’s authority over foreign affairs, and let the litigation grind on. In July 2025, Congress itself voted to claw back $9 billion from foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the outfit that funds NPR and PBS. The last president to reach for a pocket rescission before Trump was Jimmy Carter, and Carter sent his up with the 45 days to spare.
So the objection is not really that money got rescinded. Congress rescinded $9 billion of it by its own vote fourteen months ago. The objection is timing — that this White House read the calendar as carefully as it read the statute.
Here is the part nobody in that chorus wants said plainly: the House chose to leave. Nobody impounded their flights. An institution that guards its power of the purse does not adjourn through the end of the fiscal year and then hold a press conference about usurpation. Collins is right that OMB is not supposed to decide which programs are worth funding. What she is describing is a vacuum, not a crime — and vacuums get filled.
$810 million is a rounding error. The precedent is not. If a president can time a rescission to the fiscal calendar and make it stick, then the power of the purse belongs to whoever is still in the building on September 30.
This year, that was Donald Trump.
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