At least one senior congressional appropriator isn’t interested in White House budget chief Russ Vought’s enthusiasm for so-called “pocket rescissions,” which would allow the Trump administration to make permanent cuts to federal spending without congressional approval.
“I think it’s a bad idea,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chair of the Interior-Environment subcommittee, told reporters Tuesday. “It undermines Congress’s authority.”
A pocket rescission is a standard rescission request from the White House to claw back money already approved by Congress, but one that is made with fewer than forty-five days left in the fiscal year. The administration then withholds the funding through Sept. 30, in an attempt to permanently cancel it.
The Government Accountability Office has concluded that using the maneuver in that way is not true to the law. Yet Vought has repeatedly brought up the concept in television appearances and private meetings on Capitol Hill, touting the pocket rescission as a tool at the administration’s disposal if Congress can’t or won’t green-light the executive branch’s cancellation of funding that both chambers already approved.
Simpson said the president needs to evaluate bills that come to his desk as a whole, just like lawmakers have to routinely swallow certain provisions in large pieces of legislation they wouldn’t support as standalone propositions.
“What I’ve been saying is, if the president doesn’t like a bill, he has to look at it just like we do every appropriation bill — I can find something I don’t like in there. He has to look at it and say, ‘is it good, is it bad’ — in total — and then you have to live with the parts that you might not like,” said Simpson. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
Congressional Republicans are currently weighing the administration’s first rescissions request of $9.4 billion spending cuts across foreign aid programs and public media. It’s not guaranteed that the package will have the votes for passage, however, and the Trump administration is anticipating that future packages may not be able to win broad support, either.
“If there is not a political will, particularly in the Senate, and then put ourselves in a position where we have lost other executive tools that exist, namely pocket rescissions, to be able to make these cuts permanent without having to get an affirmative vote from the House and the Senate,” Vought told reporters on a recent call.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Tuesday he welcomes more rescissions packages, “because clearly, there’s a lot more we want to cut, and I’m sure there’s a lot more they want to cut.” But he didn’t comment directly on the pocket rescission strategy Vought has been touting.
“We’re going to have a conversation with [the White House] to talk about what the long-term goal is going to be,” said Scalise.
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
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