The White House Rescinded $810 Million on a Timer. Congress Never Got the Full 45 Days to Object.

The White House told Congress on September 26 that it will not spend $810 million already appropriated for the fiscal year that closes September 30. It is the second pocket rescission the administration has used in just over a year to keep approved money from going out the door. The request landed five days before that deadline, leaving Congress no realistic path to finish the review the law is supposed to give it.

How the 45-day rule is supposed to work

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 gives a president one lawful way to cancel money Congress already appropriated: send a rescission request, then wait. Congress gets 45 days of continuous session to approve it. If lawmakers do nothing, the law requires the funds to be released as originally planned. The Nixon-era Congress that wrote that 45-day clock built it specifically to stop a president from simply sitting on money it disliked.

The dispute is over what happens when a request arrives so late in the fiscal year that the 45 days cannot finish before the money's spending authority expires anyway. The administration's position is that the funds simply lapse on schedule, no different from any appropriation that runs past its deadline unspent. The Government Accountability Office has rejected that reading twice, in a 2018 decision and again this year: it found no basis in the statute for a president to use the request itself to shorten how long an appropriation stays available. The office put it plainly in guidance reaffirmed in 2025: 'A pocket rescission could allow a president to avoid spending the money regardless of whether Congress approves the rescission request.'

What each side is actually arguing

The White House's rescission notice frames the cuts as a matter of priorities, not procedure. Budget officials wrote that the reductions are consistent with 'ending Federal taxpayer dollars to support non-citizens,' pointing to the refugee, asylum and immigrant-student programs that make up most of the $810 million. That is a policy argument, not a legal one. Nothing in the notice claims the 45-day review requirement doesn't apply, only that the money should not have been spent this way to begin with.

“OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.”

Collins rejected both the timing and the reasoning behind the cuts. Sen. Patty Murray, the Appropriations Committee's top Democrat, aimed at the same separation-of-powers question from the other party: 'Russ Vought's message to Congress is that your votes don't count, and your laws are optional.' Neither senator disputed that OMB has the legal right to request a rescission. Both disputed that a request filed this close to the deadline counts as a real request at all.

The same fight already happened once, unresolved

This is not the administration's first pocket rescission. In August 2025, the Office of Management and Budget used the same tool to withhold about $4.9 billion in foreign aid, including roughly $3.2 billion routed through USAID. Aid groups sued, and a lower court ordered the money obligated. The Supreme Court stayed that order in September 2025, letting the funds stay frozen while the case continued, but the majority was explicit that the stay was not a ruling on whether pocket rescissions are lawful.

That case is still open more than a year later. No court has decided the underlying question, which means this second attempt is proceeding under the same legal cloud as the first, not a settled precedent either side can point to.

Whether the tactic survives a full review will not be settled before this round of money is gone. The fiscal year closes in five days regardless of what a judge eventually rules, and Congress reconvenes after the deadline has already passed on the funds in question. If pocket rescissions hold up in court, the calendar becomes the enforcement mechanism: file the request tight enough against September 30, and the 45-day clock runs out before Congress's power of the purse is ever used.