By Thomas Whitaker
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s request to cancel $810 million in previously approved spending is still formally before Congress, and the 45-day window lawmakers have to act on it will not close until after Election Day. That timing has turned a relatively small package, a sliver of the federal budget, into one of the sharpest tests yet of how far a president can go in declining to spend money Congress has already provided.
The fight runs straight through the House Budget Committee, which writes the budget rules that include the 1974 Impoundment Control Act. The panel’s top Democrat wants to tighten that law. Its Republican majority has generally backed the administration’s push to cut spending it considers wasteful, while some Republican appropriators in the Senate have objected to the method the White House used.
What the White House proposed
In a Sept. 25 message to Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump reported “11 rescissions of budget authority, totaling $810 million,” affecting programs at the departments of Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development and Justice, along with international assistance.
By far the largest item is $567 million from the Refugee and Entrant Assistance account at HHS, which funds the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The administration’s justification says the account “is overfunded due to the Administration’s successful border policies,” noting that executive orders on the border and the refugee admissions program “have dramatically curtailed arrivals.” Other items include $69.6 million for international education and foreign-language programs, $56 million for HUD housing counseling, $28 million for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, $25 million for competitive grants for migrant students, $15 million for the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service and $10 million each for the Minority Business Development Agency and a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services citizenship grant program.
The administration framed the package as a taxpayer-protection measure. For several items it said rescinding the money “would eliminate unnecessary and wasteful spending,” and it noted that DHS had already paused the citizenship grant program, which neither the president’s budget nor the enacted 2026 homeland security spending bill funded.
Why the timing matters
Under the Impoundment Control Act, a president may ask Congress to cancel funds and hold that money for up to 45 days of congressional session while lawmakers decide. Because the message arrived five days before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, the accounts were set to expire before that clock ran out. Critics call the maneuver a “pocket rescission.”
The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s nonpartisan auditor, said in a Sept. 29 decision that all 11 accounts were marked to expire at the end of fiscal 2026 and that the congressional review period “will end no earlier than November 9, 2026.” GAO concluded that the proposals “do not permit the President to withhold the appropriations beyond the end of fiscal year 2026,” adding that its finding “should not be interpreted as taking a position on the policies or programs contained in the special message.”
The administration rejects GAO’s reading. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought responded on social media that the decision was “not a surprise,” The Hill reported. “GAO has become hyper partisan and Congress recently attempted to cut their spending because of it,” Vought wrote, accusing the agency of shifting its legal positions “based on whether Democrats are in the White House.” The White House referred The Hill to Vought’s statement.
The administration also has a court ruling in its corner. When Trump used the same approach last year to block $4.9 billion in foreign aid, the Supreme Court allowed it to proceed, finding that the government had made a sufficient showing “at this early stage” that the lawsuit was precluded under the Impoundment Control Act, The Hill reported. GAO, which found that use unlawful too, did not sue. The Congressional Research Service has published a legal analysis of pocket rescissions and Congress’s options.
The House Budget Committee divide
Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the committee’s ranking Democrat, has made the issue a centerpiece of his oversight. “Donald Trump knows he can’t get these cuts through Congress, so he is illegally making them through the back door,” Boyle said in a Sept. 25 statement.
After the GAO decision, he renewed his call for his Congressional Power of the Purse Act, which would require OMB to release funds at least 90 days before they expire and would create criminal penalties for violations of the impoundment law. “GAO’s decision is clear: President Trump’s pocket rescission is illegal and subverts Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” Boyle said in a Sept. 29 statement. On Oct. 7 he welcomed a separate GAO finding that HHS violated the law by withholding research money for the healthcare research agency, saying the agency “violated the law by withholding funding Congress provided for critical health research.”
Boyle could become chairman of the committee next year if Democrats win the House majority on Nov. 3, Roll Call has noted. The current chairman, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), is retiring.
The Buffalo Chronicle did not find a public statement from Arrington on the September package. He has been a consistent supporter of using the impoundment law’s rescission process to cut spending. When the House passed a $9.4 billion rescission package last year that codified cuts identified by the Department of Government Efficiency, he said, “President Trump continues to deliver on his promise to cut wasteful Washington spending and get our nation’s fiscal house in order.” He added: “Every dollar we spend on woke and wasteful federal programs is a dollar we steal from our children’s future.”
That package went through the full 45-day process and passed both chambers, the route both GAO and the administration’s critics say the law contemplates.
Republican appropriators push back
The sharpest Republican criticism has come from the Senate. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the move “the most recent attempt by this Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse,” CNBC reported. “Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” Collins said. The Hill reported that other Republican appropriators are working with her on possible guardrails in the next round of spending bills.
Senate Republicans have not supported a statutory ban. On Sept. 30, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, asked for unanimous consent to pass a bill barring a president from sending a rescission request within 90 days of the funds’ expiration. Republicans blocked it, according to his office. “Their plan is simple: since they cannot cancel funds, they are trying to run out the clock until those funds expire,” Merkley said on the floor.
The Western New York connection
One of the immigration-related grant lines in the package touches a program that has been used in Buffalo. Federal records show Journey’s End Refugee Services received a $300,000 USCIS citizenship and naturalization grant for Nov. 22, 2024, through Sept. 30, 2026, funded from the program’s 2024 appropriation. The September package targets the program’s 2025 money, and the administration says DHS has “cancelled previously awarded grants from prior years.” It is not clear whether the Buffalo award was affected; The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the agency.
Buffalo’s resettlement agencies have already absorbed federal cuts. When refugee funding was frozen in January 2025, five Western New York agencies lost federal support for 731 recently arrived refugees and launched a $1.5 million fundraising campaign, Spectrum News reported. Journey’s End laid off 21 people, about 17% of its workforce.
What comes next
The House returns after the Nov. 3 election with the review period ending no earlier than Nov. 9 and the government’s stopgap funding law expiring Dec. 11. Congress can pass a bill approving some or all of the rescissions, ignore the request, or write new limits on the practice into the year-end spending deal. With the accounts expired, the practical question is whether any money is left to spend if Congress declines to act, and that is where GAO and the White House disagree.
The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the House Budget Committee’s majority and minority offices, Arrington, Boyle, the Office of Management and Budget, the White House press office and Journey’s End Refugee Services for comment and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, home to the Office of Management and Budget, by Sdkb, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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