The White House announced Friday that President Donald Trump is canceling nearly $1 billion in spending that Congress had formally approved, deploying a rare and legally contested mechanism to eliminate funding for immigrant services and diversity-related programs. The move represents the latest in a sustained effort by the Trump administration to assert direct control over federal expenditures — a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, not the executive branch.
The mechanism at the centre of the controversy is known as a “pocket rescission.” Under the Impoundment Control Act, the president may propose rescinding congressionally appropriated funds, but Congress then has 45 legislative days to review and approve that proposal. The administration exploited the calendar by announcing the rescissions with only five days remaining in the federal fiscal year — and with the House of Representatives out of session — making any meaningful congressional response functionally impossible. The fiscal year closes on Wednesday, effectively locking in the cancellations before lawmakers could act.
The Government Accountability Office, an independent arm of Congress, has previously stated that pocket rescissions of this kind are illegal. That legal assessment did not deter the White House. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget framed the cuts as targeting “the most harmful government spending,” a characterization that stands in sharp contrast to the bipartisan support many of these programs received when they were originally funded through legislation the president himself signed into law.
The largest share of the canceled funds — $567 million — targets Health and Human Services programs that provide services to refugees, asylum seekers, and unaccompanied minors. The administration argues these expenditures are no longer necessary because illegal border crossings have declined significantly. An additional $50 million in programs assisting immigrants and non-citizens is also being rescinded, alongside $70 million in international education grants and fellowships the White House labels “woke,” and $56 million in Housing and Urban Development programs. In total, the White House informed lawmakers of $810 million in pocket rescissions, according to Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins.
Collins, a Republican senator from Maine and one of the most influential voices on federal spending in the Senate, issued a sharp rebuke of the administration’s conduct. She said lawmakers received no warning or consultation before the announcement, and she accused the Office of Management and Budget of deliberately withholding the funds for months in order to execute what she called an “unlawful cancellation of appropriations.” Her criticism carries particular weight given her position and her party affiliation — this was not a partisan attack from across the aisle, but a senior Republican challenging a Republican White House on constitutional grounds. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the committee, was more blunt, calling the maneuver “theft from the American people, plain and simple.”
This is not the first time Trump has reached for this tool. A year ago, his administration used a pocket rescission to block $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid — the first use of the mechanism since 1977, during the Carter administration. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to block those rescissions, concluding that the president’s authority over foreign affairs was a significant factor in the analysis. That ruling, however, applied specifically to foreign aid. The current rescissions target domestic spending, where the constitutional and legal terrain may look quite different, and where Congress’s power of the purse has historically been treated as more firmly protected.
What emerges from this episode is a deliberate and escalating pattern: an executive branch systematically testing the outer limits of its authority over public funds, using procedural timing as a lever to circumvent legislative oversight. Whether courts will ultimately treat domestic pocket rescissions the same way they treated the foreign aid case remains an open question — but the constitutional stakes are real, and the precedent being set extends well beyond the specific programs currently on the chopping block.
