Congressional watchdog says Trump administration can’t defy lawmakers to revoke $810M

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration must spend the $810 million that it said last week it planned to cancel, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. 

The congressional watchdog’s decision contends the White House budget office doesn’t hold the ability to claw back that funding without approval from Congress. 

“Any withholding of appropriated funds beyond their date of expiration, regardless of size, subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” wrote GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought disagreed with the decision, though he wrote in a social media post it was not “a surprise.”

“GAO has become hyper partisan and Congress recently attempted to cut their spending because of it,” Vought wrote. “GAO changed its long-time opinion on this very issue from the 1970s when they specifically noted the tool was available to the president. They make their legal assessments based on whether Democrats are in the White House.”

‘Pocket rescission’

A federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act allows the White House to ask Congress to cancel funding that lawmakers previously approved and the president signed into law.  

Lawmakers have 45 days after the rescission request is sent to decide whether they want to approve it in full or modify the proposal. Congress declining to take any action means lawmakers have rejected the plans and the administration must spend the money. 

A request sent during the last 45 days of the federal fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, is known as a pocket rescission. 

The Trump administration believes that sending a rescissions request during that timeframe allows it to cancel the funding regardless of whether lawmakers sign off on the plan. 

The GAO has disagreed with that opinion before and reiterated it Tuesday in its five-page decision.

“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse, and Congress did not cede this important power through the ICA,” Perez wrote.  

“Instead, the terms of the ICA are strictly limited,” she added. “The ICA permits only the temporary withholding of budget authority and provides that unless Congress rescinds the amounts at issue, they must be made available for obligation. The President cannot rely on the authority in the ICA to withhold amounts from obligation, while simultaneously disregarding the ICA’s limitations.”

Refugee aid programs

The rescissions request the Trump administration sent Congress on Friday proposed lawmakers cancel funding for several line items, including refugee assistance programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, a Treasury Department program that provided “debt forgiveness to foreign countries that make climate change-related investments for coral reefs and tropical forests” and a grant program at the Minority Business Development Agency.

The administration submitted its first pocket rescissions request in August 2025 and cancelled $4.9 billion without congressional action. 

That came a few months after the White House budget office successfully worked with Republican lawmakers to rescind $9 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and certain foreign aid accounts.