WASHINGTON — President Trump is moving to cancel nearly $5 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid and peacekeeping spending in a rare “pocket rescission,” The Post has learned — making use of a legally debated maneuver that hasn’t been done in 48 years.
Trump on Thursday night notified Congress of his request to cancel the funds, which had been tied up in a court case until earlier in the day.
A pocket rescission is a request that’s presented to Congress so late in the fiscal year — which ends Sept. 30 — that it’s made regardless of whether Congress acts.
The clawback includes $3.2 billion in United States Agency for International Development (USAID) development assistance, $322 million from the USAID-State Department Democracy Fund, $521 million in State Department contributions to international organizations, $393 million in State Department contributions to peacekeeping activities and $445 million in separately budgeted peacekeeping aid.
The spending had been destined for a wide variety of nonprofits and foreign governments and was paused earlier this year by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and then stuck in legal limbo due to an ensuing lawsuit filed by the Global Health Council.
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday lifted an injunction in the case, opening the door for Trump to proceed with the first attempted pocket rescission since 1977.
The Trump administration has highlighted spending items that are allegedly wasteful, such as $24.6 million for “climate resilience” in Honduras, $2.7 million for the South African Democracy Works Foundation, which published inflammatory racial articles including “The Problem with White People,” and $3.9 million to promote democracy among LGBT people in the Western Balkans.
Other highlighted allocations include $1.5 million to market the paintings of Ukrainian women.
The roughly $838 million in peacekeeping funds being eliminated include payments to support United Nations peacekeeping forces in places such at the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Trump administration recently brokered a peace deal with next-door Rwanda, and the Central African Republic, where the mission has been criticized as aligned with Russian business interests.
Allocated peacekeeping funds include $11 million to provide Uruguay’s international peacekeeping forces with armored personnel carriers, $4 million for a training center in Zambia and $3 million for barracks to house Kazakhstani peacekeepers.
The clawback would not affect US support for the Multinational Force and Observers peacekeeping mission along the Egyptian-Israeli border.
The legality of “pocket rescissions” is a matter of intense debate, but there’s little court precedent.
The legislative Government Accountability Office deems the practice illegal; Trump’s OMB team says otherwise.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 limits the president’s ability to balk at spending appropriated funds and lays out the process for legislative rescissions — such as the package Trump signed last month yanking $1 billion in federal funding for NPR and PBS and $8 billion from USAID.
That law sets a 45-day clock for Congress to pass rescissions proposed by the president.
OMB Director Russ Vought and General Counsel Mark Paoletta have pointed to instances where Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter arguably made pocket rescissions in the 1970s.
“Carter sent several rescission proposals to Congress in July of 1977. Funds from two of those proposals lapsed on September 30, 1977, in one case prior to the expiration of the 45-day ICA withholding period, and in another case five days after the withholding period ended,” Paoletta wrote in a 2018 letter to the GAO.
“GAO noted the lapse without objection.”
Paoletta has pointed repeatedly to a 1975 GAO opinion authorizing the practice, asserting on X this month that the office changed its mind during Trump’s first term due to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
GAO is uniquely positioned to sue over Trump’s pocket rescission — particularly after the just-concluded DC Circuit Court of Appeals case involving the same funds ended with a conclusion that the Impoundment Control Act cannot be enforced by private litigants.
But it’s unclear if GAO actually will sue due to simmering theories that the agency’s comptroller general position, currently held by Eugene Louis Dodaro, could itself be declared unconstitutional.
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