Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-ME) accused the Trump administration's budget office of breaking the law Friday after it moved to cancel $810 million in funding Congress had already approved.
In a statement, Collins said the administration sent over the package of so-called pocket rescissions with no advance notice, calling it the budget office's latest effort to chip away at Congress' authority over federal spending. The Office of Management and Budget is led by Russ Vought.
A pocket rescission exploits a quirk in the Impoundment Control Act, which lets the administration freeze funds for 45 days while Congress considers a cancellation request. A request sent near the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 can let the money expire before lawmakers act. This package arrived with five days left.
The package includes 11 rescissions across the departments of Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development and Justice, as well as international assistance programs, according to President Donald Trump's notice to House Speaker Mike Johnson, first reported by the New York Post. The largest piece, $567 million, had been set aside for Health and Human Services programs serving refugees, asylum seekers and other noncitizens, the White House said.
Collins argued that OMB deliberately sat on the money for months, which she said was itself an unreported impoundment.
"OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding," she said.
The Government Accountability Office rejected the legal theory behind pocket rescissions in 2018.
"Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law," Collins said, vowing to work with colleagues to address what she called "illegal actions."
It's not the first time Collins has clashed with Vought over the tactic.
She issued a nearly identical warning last August, when OMB sought to cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid through a pocket rescission. Collins later said that package was dropped on lawmakers at midnight, and that Vought called her the next morning to tell her about it.
The Supreme Court allowed the administration to keep withholding roughly $4 billion of that aid in a preliminary ruling last September, without deciding whether the maneuver is legal.
Critics have accused Republicans of helping the White House seize Congress' spending power, while Vought has defended pocket rescissions as a legitimate executive tool.