Supreme Court Temporarily Restores Trump’s “Pocket Rescission” of $4 billion in Foreign Aid
The fight over funding is the heart of the Trump agenda to disembowel the Democrat-Leftist activist federal-government-funded industrial complex. Trump is gaining the upper hand in SCOTUS and gradually overcoming lower court resistance.
The fight over funding is the heart of the Trump agenda to disembowel the Democrat-Leftist activist federal-government-funded industrial complex. When successful, after the court challenges have worn out, tens of billions of dollars that went to leftwing activist groups will have gone away. Keep this up for several years and the beast will starve.
Today the Supreme Court once again issued a stay against a lower court injunction interfering with Trump’s executive authority.
From the SCOTUS Order in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition:
On September 3, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered a preliminary injunction directing the Executive to obligate roughly $10.5 billion of appropriated aid funding set to expire on September 30. Of that $10.5 billion, $4 billion was proposed to be rescinded in a “special message” transmitted pursuant to the Impoundment Control Act. See 2 U. S. C. §681 et seq. After the District Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied stays of that order, the Government filed this application to stay the District Court’s injunction. The application for stay presented to THE CHIEF JUSTICE and by him referred to the Court is granted. The Government, at this early stage, has made a sufficient showing that the Impoundment Control Act precludes respondents’ suit, brought pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, to enforce the appropriations at issue here. The Government has also made a sufficient showing that mandamus relief is unavailable to respondents. And, on the record before the Court, the asserted harms to the Executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm faced by respondents. This order should not be read as a final determination on the merits. The relief granted by the Court today reflects our preliminary view, consistent with the standards for interim relief.
The District Court’s September 3, 2025 order granting a preliminary injunction in case Nos. 1:25–cv–400 and 1:25cv–402 is stayed as to the funding subject to the President’s August 28 special message, pending the disposition of the Government’s appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such writ is timely sought. Should the petition for a writ of certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.
Once again, the law is on our side.
Today the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold President Trump’s historic use of a pocket rescission to cancel nearly $5 billion in wasteful, woke, and weaponized foreign assistance and international organization spending.
Another HUGE win for…
— Department of State (@StateDept) September 26, 2025
I was really hoping for an angry KBJ dissent, or at least a fiery Sotomayor dissent. All we got was Kagan – booorrrring (wake me up when it’s over):
This emergency application raises novel issues fundamental to the relationship between the President and Congress. It arises from the refusal of the President and his officers to obligate and spend billions of dollars that Congress appropriated for foreign aid. Prospective beneficiaries of those funds challenged the decision to withhold them as an unlawful impoundment—essentially, a Presidential usurpation of Congress’s power of the purse. The main legal question presented in this application involves the meaning and effect of a statute concerning impoundments: More specifically, the question is whether that statute precludes the beneficiaries’ suit to make the Executive comply with appropriations laws. This Court, before today, has dealt with the statute only in passing; neither have lower courts much addressed it. Deciding the question presented thus requires the Court to work in uncharted territory. And, to repeat, the stakes are high: At issue is the allocation of power between the Executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies.
Why is it called a “Pocket Recission“?
The decision effectively blessed Trump’s “pocket rescission” — a controversial maneuver in which the president withheld the funds toward the end of the fiscal year so that the money could not be spent even if Congress did not approve the rescission.
That tactic was designed to circumvent the usual process for a rescission of funds: a special request from the president followed by a 45-day period in which Congress must agree to the request for it to become effective.
The ruling comes as the federal government hurtles toward a Sept. 30 deadline to avert a government shutdown, and it could make bipartisan negotiations an even taller order. Democrats wary of cutting deals with GOP leaders must now face the more concrete prospect that Trump could again refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress.
POCKET RESCISSIONS!
Here's OMB Director @russvought telling me back on July 10th that the WH is seriously considering using "pocket rescissions" to cut out-of-control government spending.
It can be done in the final 45 days of the fiscal year. We're in the zone. pic.twitter.com/LaSkPQDItV
— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) August 19, 2025
Here are some of the funding that has been stopped through this pocket rescission:
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- $400 million per year for global climate grift projects like:
- A partnership with the Green Climate Fund, for the Barbados Blue-Green Bank for climate change mitigation.
- $650,000 for micro-insurance for smallholder farmers and microbusinesses in Colombia for climate disaster response.
- $24.6 million to build climate resilience in Honduras.
- $38.6 million for biodiversity and low-emissions development in West Africa.
- $400 million per year for global climate grift projects like:
***
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- $2.7 million to advance “inclusive democracy” in South Africa through the Democracy Works Foundation, which has published articles such as “The Problem with Whiteness,” and “The Problem with White People.” One article claims that White South Africans are “not even aware” of the “hostility they unleash” against black people; another lauds terrorism and communism as an effective means of deconstructing White Afrikaner identity.
- $4 million for the New Alliance for Global Equality to advance “global LGBTQI+ awareness.”
- $3.9 million to promote “democracy” for LGBTQI+ populations in the Western Balkans.
- $2 million for “Organizing for Feminist Democratic Principles” in Africa
***
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- $75 million per year to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which works to advance divisive social and cultural causes, with an outsized focus on the globalist ideological agenda in the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” and has long fostered antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment.
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Comments
I, along with over half the voting population, voted for this.
This has been law for years.
Congress could have gone to CT to assert their case but didn’t. Congress can vote to restore the funding in the next budget or CR. Either way this is a political question and/or dispute between the Congress and the Executive. If and when a majority in both HoR and Senate choose to assert themselves then there will be an active controversy but IMO not until then. I suppose the entities denied funds might have gone to the Court of Federal Claims but that seems shaky, unless they are a prime contractor they wouldn’t have standing in that Court either.
“…essentially, a Presidential usurpation of Congress’s power of the purse.”
Please read the Constitution. It says Congress makes appropriations. The only rule for spending (an executive function) is that funds withdrawn from the treasury must by only those appropriated by Congress. It is entirely silent on whether or not the Executive must spend appropriated funds.
Statutes that attempt to direct how the Executive spends appropriated funds are unconstitutional infringements upon the the Executive’s authority and violate the separation of powers. (The Constitution does not grant Congress any authority over spending whatsoever. The authority to appropriate determines only how funds are meant to be spent, it does not imply authority over the spending itself. If Congress had authority over spending, why is the Executive doing the spending?)
This makes perfect sense.
Congress appropriates.
The Executive spends
The functions are separated to prevent abuse in the spending of the public’s money.
Congress determines how much can be spent.
The Executive determines if it should be spent.
Congress limits the Executive’s ability to spend.
The Executive limits the ability of the Congress to waste.
IMO this view is a bit too broad. For funds Congress has authorized to be spent AND passed a specific appropriation for those funds to be spent on a specific purpose …then IMO the Executive doesn’t have discretion and must spend the funds. Remember that the Executive could have refused to sign the budget legislation or requested Congress to rescind those particular authorized and appropriated funding items.
That said when, as here, there’s only an authorization but no specific funding appropriation requiring $X be spent on Y item then I’d agree that the Executive could refuse to spend those funds b/c there’s no requirement made by Congress to do so. In essence Congress has passed discretion to the Executive to spend or not.
Of course they restored it. It’s the law. If Congress wants to do differently they’ve had the opportunity.
A Reuters article on this goes to great lengths explaining how Congress has the power of the purse without mentioning the arguments for why the President may not be obligated to empty it.
Isn’t this essentially a line item veto that many states governors have?
It seems to me that Congress can allocate monies but I don’t see the logic that says the Executive branch needs to spend every last penny of the allocated monies. So if the Executive does not need to account for spending every last penny, how close to the limit is the spending requirement? 1%, 2%, 5%, …? Practically it cannot be that the Executive branch must spend exactly the amount allocated. If that is so, then logically the Executive branch has the discretion to spend however much (or little) up to the limit. Clearly, the Executive branch cannot transfer funds from one allocation to another or commit spending when there is no allocation as Joe Biden attempted to do with the student loan forgiveness but the Executive branch should have the discretion to manage a given allocation. Congress, of course, has the freedom to “beat about the head and shoulders” the responsible cabinet officer in the case that the allocation was not spent per the intent of Congress.
Line-item veto at the federal level has been disposed of since (I believe) the 1990s when SCOTUS struck down a Contract With America item providing it.
The reasoning may be open to reconsideration, but for now the Impoundment Control Act must be considered as a different sort of authority, or it too would have been struck down.