GAO Says Trump's $810 Million Rescission Broke the Law. The Fiscal Year Closes Today Anyway.

The Government Accountability Office told Congress on September 29 that the White House broke federal law when it withheld $810 million from 11 appropriation accounts this month. The finding will not put a dollar of that money back to work. Fiscal year 2026 closes September 30, one day after the opinion arrived, and the spending authority attached to those accounts expires with it regardless of which side is right.

What the letter actually says

GAO's letter, signed by General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez and addressed to Vice President JD Vance and the four congressional leaders, walks through the mechanics directly. The Impoundment Control Act lets a president ask Congress to cancel appropriated money, then gives lawmakers 45 days of continuous session to act on that request. Here, GAO wrote, the accounts in question carry a Treasury fund symbol that expires at the end of fiscal year 2026, and the 45-day clock on the White House's September 25 request will not run out until November 9 at the earliest, more than a month after the money is already gone.

“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse, and Congress did not cede this important power through the ICA. The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind.”

GAO's enclosure lists the specific programs tied to the 11 accounts: refugee assistance funds inside the Department of Health and Human Services, an alternatives-to-detention program at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security grants, a State Department climate-reporting initiative, a Department of Education grant program for foreign-language and cultural-studies teaching, and money at the Minority Business Development Agency and Department of Justice, among others.

A finding GAO has made twice before

This is not a new legal theory. GAO reached the same conclusion in a 2018 opinion, B-330330, and cited that precedent directly in Tuesday's letter. It repeated the finding again in September 2025, when the administration used the identical pocket-rescission tactic to withhold roughly $4.9 billion in foreign aid, about $3.2 billion of it State Department and USAID funding. That case is still unresolved. The Supreme Court allowed the 2025 rescission to proceed on an emergency posture but noted its order 'should not be read as a final determination on the merits.' Three GAO opinions across eight years have landed on the same reading of the statute. None has yet produced a court ruling that settles it.

OMB Director Russ Vought dismissed Tuesday's finding in a social media post, writing that GAO 'has become hyper partisan' and suggesting Congress had tried to cut the watchdog's own budget over it. The administration's position, consistent since the 2025 rescission, is that pocket timing is a legitimate use of the 45-day window, not a workaround of it.

“The independent Government Accountability Office has concluded that pocket rescissions are unlawful and not permitted by the Impoundment Control Act.”

Collins is making the identical argument for the second September in a row. She raised the same objection to the same tactic when OMB withheld the foreign aid money in 2025, and her committee has not moved legislation to close the pocket-rescission window since. Without a change to the statute or a merits ruling from a court, the mechanism GAO calls illegal remains available to any administration willing to use it in the year's last week.

What changes, and what does not

Nothing about Tuesday's opinion returns the $810 million to the agencies that were due to spend it. GAO's role under the Impoundment Control Act is advisory: it can find a violation and refer the matter for enforcement, but it cannot unwind an appropriation itself. That leaves litigation as the only path to a binding answer, the same path the 2025 rescission is still on. Congress reconvenes after the midterms with the same 45-day mechanism, the same GAO opinion on the books a third time, and no legislative fix attached to either.