What Is a Pocket Rescission?

Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russ Vought has indicated his intent to implement one or more “pocket rescissions”—an illegal budgetary maneuver that, ironically, misuses an aspect of the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) to permanently impound funds. This would irreversibly prevent funds that were appropriated by Congress and enacted by the president from being spent absent subsequent legislation. While there are many legal rescissions that happen every year, a pocket rescission is neither a rescission nor is it legal.

Congress appropriates funding into budget accounts to carry out activities. A rescission occurs when some of the unused funding is clawed back. For example, if Congress appropriated $200 million to build bridges, but partway through it decided it only wanted to use $150 million on bridges, it could pass a law to rescind $50 million—assuming the government had not yet obligated the funds and thus was not yet legally on the hook for that money. Rescissions occur every year in the annual appropriations process.

When Congress appropriates funding, it specifies a period of availability within which the funding must be obligated. In a sense, obligating is like swiping your credit card—it creates a legal liability that the government must pay later. Sometimes money is available for obligation until it is fully used; sometimes it is available for a few years; and sometimes it is available for just a single year. Most of the programs that are funded in our annual appropriations bills receive money that is available for only a single year. If funds remain unobligated at the end of period of availability, they are said to have lapsed, and they are usually no longer available even though they haven’t all been used up. Setting these flexibilities or restrictions on the period of availability is one way that Congress exercises its power of the purse.

Once an appropriation becomes law, the president must ensure it is spent for its intended purpose within its period of availability. The president isn’t even allowed to freeze it temporarily unless a law gives them explicit permission to do so. To deliberately freeze significant portions of budget authority until it lapses is illegal and a violation of the president’s constitutional duty to carry out the law. Appropriations law, authorization law, and the ICA all require budget authority to be prudently obligated.

Just as Congress chooses to appropriate funding as an exercise of its constitutional power of the purse, it often chooses to rescind funding—that is, write a law to take away some of the authority it had previously given the president to spend. Congress routinely enacts rescissions every year that revoke billions of dollars—most recently in bills such as the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act of 2025 and the FY 2025 reconciliation law. Rescissions can only be enacted through laws. By definition, they are not executive actions.

Section 1012 of the ICA allows the president to transmit a special message to Congress, asking for certain funds to be rescinded—in other words, clawed back by Congress and no longer available for obligation. The Section 1012 rescissions process is special for two reasons: First, it is a presidentially initiated process. And second, a bill considering the rescissions is privileged in the Senate. In other words, it is filibuster proof and can pass with only a simple majority instead of 60 votes.

The law stipulates that, for up to 45 days after the president submits the special message, the president is legally allowed to pause further obligation of those funds. However, that power is granted if and only if the underlying appropriations and authorizing statutes allow it —and any pauses allow sufficient time for the funds to be prudently obligated. Vought incorrectly argues that the law allows a 45-day pause regardless of underlying appropriations and authorization law, in effect, creating a line item deferral law. For example, if Congress had appropriated money to carry out an MLK Day celebration, the White House would argue that it could send a 1012 special message 45 days before MLK Day and use that as an excuse to avoid using the money for the celebration on MLK Day itself in contradiction with the hypothetical spending and authorizing law.

At the end of the 45 days, the president must resume obligating those frozen funds. Importantly, the funds may be paused for 45 days regardless of congressional action if permitted under the program’s statutes. Even if Congress took up the president’s proposal within a day and voted it down, the president would still be able to pause the funds for 45 days. This is a constitutional requirement that was not in place when the ICA was originally enacted but became Supreme Court precedent. If the law were written to force the president to release the funds if Congress rejected the proposal, it would be a legislative veto, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha (1983).

But what if the president submits a request in the final 45 days of their availability, i.e., just before the period of availability for the funds ends? For most funds, that would be the final 45 days of a fiscal year, which ends on September 30 for the federal government. Vought argues that he would be able to pause the funds for 45 days—even if Congress votes down the package immediately—and allow them to lapse, thus unilaterally choose to not spend a portion of funds. This is sometimes called a pocket rescission, although it is a misnomer. Were this to happen, Congress would not have rescinded the funds; instead, the president would have unlawfully and unconstitutionally impounded the funds until they lapsed. In other words, Vought is incorrectly arguing that the ICA grants the president the power to cancel funds without congressional approval. This is antithetical to the premise of the law. It also conflicts with the requirement in Section 1012 that the funds be made available for obligation after the 45 days have elapsed, as they would no longer be available for obligation.

The timing and targets of a special message will indicate whether Vought is pursuing unlawful unilateral cancellations. The most confrontational version of this would be sent to Congress on or after August 16 and would target funds set to expire by the end of the 45-day period. Vought incorrectly believes this would permit him to freeze funding until it could no longer be used—no matter what Congress says. Similarly, Vought wrongly believes he can also cynically time a special message to effectively cancel funding without congressional input by sending a special message slightly more than 45 days before the period of availability ends but with so little time left over after the 45 days expire that it makes it infeasible for agencies to prudently obligate funding after a 45-day freeze.

However, a pocket rescission occurs whether the 45-day period spans the end of their period of the funds’ availability or if it is even close enough to the end that some or all of the funding would lapse due to insufficient time to obligate the funds after they’re released but before they lapse.

To take an extreme example, imagine that a special message is sent up 46 days before the end of the period of availability. If the president withheld the funds for all 45 days, the one remaining day wouldn’t leave enough time to obligate the funds.

How long an agency requires to prudently obligate funding varies by program and can be a matter of weeks or months—not days. In fact, when President Donald Trump illegally froze funding for Javelin missiles for Ukraine in 2019, the funds were eventually released on September 11, leaving 20 days to obligate them. Despite having almost three weeks to obligate the remaining money, meaningful amounts of the funds were set to lapse, and Congress had to intervene to rescind and reappropriate those funds in later legislation to effectively extend their period of availability.

Any request sent on July 27 or later would leave, at most, that much time to obligate the funds. Depending on what the funding is for; how much is being withheld; and how much there is left to obligate, there likely won’t be sufficient time to obligate all the remaining funds. Consider, for example, a program that makes research grants based on competitive bids. Waiting too long would not allow sufficient time to go through a bid process and make the grants.

At this point, any rescissions request should be viewed as an attempted pocket rescission, as many of the affected programs would likely not have enough time to obligate their funds.

Many reform-minded advocates who have sought to further safeguard against abuse for pocket rescissions have suggested amending the ICA to create a bright line prohibition against freezing expiring funds under the ICA, such as the end of the third fiscal quarter (June 30). This date has been chosen because it is well past the point that all budgetary and policy decisions should have been put into place by an efficient and responsible executive branch.

Yes, pocket rescissions are illegal. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is tasked by the ICA itself with adjudicating impoundments, has explained that pocket rescissions are illegal and has said that includes any request in the final 45 days of the period of availability of funds or anything that is even near the final 45 days:

We conclude that the ICA does not permit the impoundment of funds through their date of expiration. The plain language of the ICA permits only the temporary withholding of budget authority and provides that unless Congress rescinds the amounts at issue, they must be made available for obligation. Amounts proposed for rescission must be made available for prudent obligation before the amounts expire, even where the 45-day period provided in the ICA approaches or spans the date on which funds would expire.

The GAO does not believe that the ICA grants the ability to withhold funds on or near the end of the period of availability. If the ICA had a loophole that allowed the president to impound funds over the will of Congress, it would undermine the entire intent of the law, which was to clarify that the president does not have unilateral impoundment power and to create an avenue to cut spending with Congress—not without it. It does not make any sense to argue that the ICA forbids the president from letting funds lapse without congressional approval—unless the president waits until the end of the year. Such a power would also violate the fourth disclaimer of the ICA, which states that nothing in the ICA should be construed as “superseding any provision of law which requires the obligation of budget authority or the making of outlays thereunder.” Such a power would also violate Section 1012(b) itself, which says that the funds must be made available again after 45 days unless they have been rescinded. Yet, they would no longer be available for obligation as their period of availability would have ended.

However, even if the text of the ICA did allow the president to unilaterally impound funds, it would be unconstitutional under Supreme Court precedent. In the Line Item Veto Act case, Clinton v. City of New York (1998), the Supreme Court ruled that the Line Item Veto Act was unconstitutional because it explicitly granted the president the power to unilaterally change future appropriations laws. The Supreme Court held that the power to unilaterally change laws could not be delegated by an act of Congress; only Congress can write laws, and only Congress can then change them. If the legislative branch cannot divest that responsibility on purpose, it is incoherent they could have done so by accident.

Granting the president the generic power to unilaterally reduce how much funding should be obligated from a budget account is tantamount to giving the president the ability to change the funding level. That’s unconstitutional. Similarly, granting the president the power to pause all funds for 45 days—rather than just those already allowed in the underlying appropriations and authorization statutes—is unconstitutional.

There were a small number of cases in the past in which a 1012 special message led to a lapse in funds. However, these cases were never adjudicated in court, and in some cases, the administration was explicit that they did not intend to let the funds lapse. Historically, the GAO has identified attempts to do this as inconsistent with the president’s requirement to prudently obligate funding, and Congress has regularly objected to this move, including by enacting legislation to prevent or rectify unilateral cancellations under a special message. Importantly, the GAO has clarified that any such attempt now would be illegal. In its 2018 report on the topic, the GAO stated that there was “no basis to interpret the ICA as a mechanism by which the President may unilaterally abridge the enacted period of availability.” It further said that the Line Item Veto Act decision and other intervening action between those rare instances of pocket rescissions more than four decades ago and now has made those few prior instances not legally comparable to any current pocket rescission attempts.

In the ICA, the GAO is expressly granted standing to sue. In addition, any entity that should have gotten the funding but didn’t has standing to sue. In other words, anyone who has a legal claim for that funding, based on the appropriations and authorizing statutes, has standing. That could be state or local governments, school districts, universities, corporations, or individuals depending on the budget account.

While the White House has used the phrase “pocket rescission” to lend legitimacy to the concept, evoking the legality of pocket vetoes, a pocket rescission is illegal. The president does not have the power to unilaterally break budget laws—refusing to spend money to carry out legally required activities and functions.