On Friday, September 25, 2026, President Trump sent House Speaker Mike Johnson a letter under the Impoundment Control Act: “I herewith report 11 rescissions of budget authority, totaling $810 million.” The proposed cuts reach programs at the Departments of Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development and Justice, plus international assistance programs. The White House announced it that evening as a pocket rescission of “another nearly $1 billion of the most harmful government spending.”
The timing is the mechanism. The law gives Congress 45 days to act on a president's request to cancel money it has appropriated. This request arrived with five days left in the fiscal year and with the House out of session until after the November election. As NPR put it, with the fiscal year ending the announcement means the funds will go unspent and Congress cannot respond. An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson told Bloomberg Government the White House will rescind the funds whether or not Congress approves.
The Government Accountability Office, Congress's auditor, has said plainly that “A pocket rescission is illegal,” citing its 2018 decision that “the ICA does not permit the withholding of funds through their expiration date.” OMB argues the Impoundment Control Act does not explicitly forbid rescissions near the end of a fiscal year, according to a Congressional Research Service summary cited by Fox News.
About 70 percent of the money, $567,401,904, comes from the Health and Human Services account that funds the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which the letter calls “overfunded due to the Administration's successful border policies.” The rest: $69.6 million from Education's international education and foreign-language programs, $56.1 million from HUD housing counseling, $27.7 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, $24.9 million from Education's special programs for migrant students, $15 million each from a FEMA alternatives-to-detention case management pilot and the Justice Department's Community Relations Service, $10 million each from USCIS citizenship and integration grants and the Minority Business Development Agency, $8.7 million in Treasury debt relief under the Tropical Forest and Coral Reef Conservation Act, and $5.1 million from HHS's Office of Minority Health.
The sharpest objection came from the Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine: “Without warning or consultation, Congress just received an $810 million package of pocket rescissions from the Administration.” She added, “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,” and, “Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.”
Democrats went further. Sen. Patty Murray, the committee's top Democrat, called it “theft from the American people, plain and simple.” Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee: “Donald Trump knows he can't get these cuts through Congress, so he is illegally making them through the back door.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Senate Democrats will “challenge Trump's illegal cuts.” Republicans had rejected Democratic language in the stopgap spending bill, which runs to December 11, that would have barred this kind of cut. OMB answered on X: “Wasteful funding? Rescinded. We will use every fiscal tool at our disposal to deliver savings for the American people.”
It is the second year running. On August 28, 2025, Trump sent the first pocket rescission in nearly 50 years, $4.9 billion in foreign aid. A month later the Supreme Court let it stand for now, finding at that early stage that the government had “made a sufficient showing that the Impoundment Control Act precludes respondents' suit” and that harms to the executive's conduct of foreign affairs appeared to outweigh the harm to the groups suing. The order added, “This order should not be read as a final determination on the merits.” Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. The 2025 cuts were foreign aid; this year's are domestic programs.
Update (September 29, 2026): Republican appropriators are looking for a way to stop the next one. Collins told reporters, “We're already looking at whether there's language we can put in the next set of appropriations bills that would prohibit this from happening,” adding, “But it's going to take some legal work.” The likely vehicle is the spending bill Congress needs by December 11 to avoid a shutdown; she also mentioned legal action. Sen. Lisa Murkowski called pocket rescissions “sneaky and designed to go around Congress” and said, “I think Congress needs to save ourselves.” Sen. Mike Rounds: “We do not have a line-item veto available to the president, [and] this is almost the same thing.”
The obstacles are arithmetic and allies. Any bar would need 60 Senate votes and, against a veto, two-thirds of both chambers; Rounds asked, “How many votes does it take to bar him?” Republicans had earlier rejected Democratic language to the same effect, and Murray said, “I have been trying to get that language in there. … The Republicans objected.” Other Republicans defended the cut. Sen. John Kennedy, on CBS: “This stuff's spending porn.” Sen. James Lankford would not “go that far” as to call it unlawful, and Rep. Lauren Boebert called it “America First in action.” Majority Leader John Thune left it to the judges: “But again, that is probably something the courts probably decide.” The money expires September 30 either way, with the House out until after the election.
Update (September 30, 2026): GAO has now ruled on this rescission itself. Its decision B-338788, issued September 29 and addressed to the leaders of both chambers, concludes that “the rescission proposals contained in the President's September 25, 2026, special message to Congress do not permit the President to withhold the appropriations beyond the end of fiscal year 2026,” and that “The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind.” The message covers 11 appropriation accounts, all expiring at the end of the fiscal year, while the period for Congress to consider it “will end no earlier than November 9, 2026.” Budget director Russ Vought answered on X: “GAO has become hyper partisan and Congress recently attempted to cut their spending because of it,” adding, “They make their legal assessments based on whether Democrats are in the White House.” GAO found last year's pocket rescission illegal too but did not sue, and Roll Call notes the opinion is unlikely to have any practical effect unless GAO takes the administration to court.