Last year, Donald Trump canceled $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid with a “pocket rescission.” The maneuver works by asking Congress to rescind funds so close to the end of the fiscal year that the money expires before lawmakers can act. The Supreme Court let that cancellation stand. Ruling at an early stage of the case, it held that the plaintiffs likely couldn’t sue to force the spending, and it never decided whether the tactic itself was legal. Having gotten away with it once, Trump is doing it again. On September 25, five days before the fiscal year ended, the White House announced it was canceling roughly $810 million more, which it rounds up to “nearly $1 billion.”
Politico reports:
In a move that will almost certainly set up an ugly government funding battle after the midterms, Trump has again claimed the power to execute a so-called “pocket rescission” to nix money Congress has already enacted. The funding the president declared canceled is for immigration services, support to foreign countries, education programs, health research efforts and assistance for businesses owned by minorities. The Senate’s top Republican appropriator, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, immediately blasted the move as illegal, saying in a statement Friday night that “any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.”
“This move shows that 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,” Collins added, pledging to work with other lawmakers “to address these illegal actions.” ... Top Republicans have rejected Democratic demands to undo Trump’s cancellation last summer of billions of dollars in foreign aid by pushing off the expiration date for that cash. They have also rebuffed the idea of preventing Trump from executing another pocket rescission this year by barring the president from sending a clawbacks request in the last quarter of the fiscal year.
Days later, the Government Accountability Office reaffirmed that pocket rescissions are unlawful. Fiscal conservatives might happily cut some of these programs, but Congress has to be the one doing the cutting, as it did when it passed a $9 billion rescissions package through the normal process last year. If a president can void a spending law simply by sitting on the money until the clock runs out, appropriations become suggestions. Republican appropriators call the maneuver illegal, yet their leaders declined to take the one step that would have prevented a repeat. That choice is letting the power of the purse drift from the branch the Constitution gave it to.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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