Trump cuts $810 million in federal spending he previously approved

President Donald Trump recently snipped $810 million in federal spending. The late September cuts would come to spending authorized mostly for federal aid to undocumented immigrants.“President Trump is committed to utilizing all possible tools to cut wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens,” a White House spokesperson said in a Sept. 25 statement. The Department of Health and Human Services experienced the most cuts. The president removed $28 million in HHS research funds and $10 million from the agency’s Office of Minority Health. Trump also nixed $567 million in grants that would have gone to charitable and nongovernmental organizations aiding refugees.Other agencies also had their dollars trimmed. Unsurprisingly, the Education Department, which Trump is downsizing, experienced the second-largest cut at $95 million, followed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development at $56 million. The departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, Justice, and the Treasury each had their funding reduced by $9 million to $15 million. Some legislators in Congress are aggrieved at the president’s action.“Trump is taking the bipartisan funding that we passed, funding the Democrats and Republicans agreed on that he signed into law, and he’s now ripping out the pages he doesn’t like,” complained Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), her party’s top member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. (Washington Examiner illustration; Tom Brenner/AP; Getty Images) Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) sought to block the cuts by introducing legislation and pressing the chamber to pass it promptly. He was unable to muster sufficient support in the chamber, and his effort faced obvious hurdles: a GOP-controlled House and the president’s veto.Democrats were not the only legislators complaining.“I think it’s wrong, and I think it makes it very difficult for Congress to do their job,” observed Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee.The spending that Trump deleted was part of a larger bill that Republicans and Democrats had bargained for and that the president himself had signed into law. The pocket rescission, then, feels like a betrayal to some legislators. Congress has just two months to pass spending bills to keep the government open, and Trump’s action likely will make Senate Democrats all the more wary of cutting deals with Republicans.Aside from the politics, the use of a pocket rescission is legally dubious. Rounds noted that the Constitution doesn’t provide a president with a line-item veto, and the pocket rescission “is almost the same thing.” Congress attempted to empower the president with a line-item veto in 1996. The Supreme Court struck down the law two years later after then-President Bill Clinton was sued for using it. The court reasoned that an alteration to a previous spending law must go through the Constitution’s lawmaking process, which requires both chambers to approve it and the president to sign it.Last month’s action is the second time Trump has deployed a pocket veto. In September 2025, he nixed $4.9 billion in spending on international aid programs. Various groups sued the administration, but the Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 vote that the plaintiffs likely lacked standing to sue, while cautioning that its decision “should not be read as a final determination on the merits.”Trump could have chosen a clearly legal path to attempt to rescind the funds. As this magazine reported last year, the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act permits a president to ask Congress for permission not to spend funds. The executive may send a message to the Senate and House specifying the funds to be cut, and Congress has 45 days to pass a bill to approve the president’s request. The rescission fails if both chambers do not pass the rescission bill within that time frame. Indeed, Trump partnered with Congress to lop $9 billion from foreign aid programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the summer of 2025.This time around, however, the president chose to deploy a pocket rescission, which requires no congressional action to take effect. He and the Office of Management and Budget waited to deliver his request for cuts until five days before the end of the current fiscal year. With the House of Representatives recessed and its members out campaigning across the country, it would have been all but impossible for both chambers to vote to pass the cuts before the funding expired.“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,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) wrote in a social media post. “Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also, it is a usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers. OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.”Collins, who helms the Senate Appropriations Committee, has vowed to “address these illegal actions.”The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office issued a legal opinion in 2018 stating that, constitutionally and legally, there is “no basis to construe the ICA as a mechanism by which the President may, in effect, unilaterally shorten the availability of budget authority by transmitting rescission proposals shortly before amounts are due to expire.”SCHUMER’S GRIP ON NEW YORK LOOSENS UNDER TRUMP 2.0The GAO sent a letter to Congress after Trump’s latest pocket rescission. The agency declared the 45-day clock extends past the end of the fiscal year to Nov. 9, and that Trump’s letter to Congress was not legal grounds for him to continue to withhold the money.Whether Trump will be forced to spend the funds to be restored is unclear. Various private groups have filed lawsuits against the pocket rescission. Congress also may restore the funds as part of the broader fiscal 2027 spending deal it is working on.Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and edits UnderstandingCongress.org.