Sen. James Lankford on President Trump's attempt to use a "pocket" rescission

President Trump successfully used Congress's rescissions process to rescind close to $9 billion in funding that had been previously approved by lawmakers for use in FY 2025. The process requires that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) formally submit a request to leadership detailing the funding the president wants rescinded. Congress then has 45 days to act on the request. If Congress takes no action in that time frame, the request is denied.

The president's OMB director just submitted a second rescission request, in an effort to claw back $4.9 billion in funding Congress appropriated to the State Department for foreign aid. The problem is that there are now fewer than 45 days remaining in the fiscal year, making the request unlawful, in the eyes of the General Accounting Office, since it potentially obviates Congress's Article 1 power of the purse. President Trump says, under the Budget and Impoundment Act, he has the authority to rescind funding unilaterally.

This could end up in the courts. Senator Lankford addressed the issue in an interview on Wednesday.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma)

"The president wants to reduce wasteful foreign aid spending. He laid out a pretty extensive list of 'here are the different programs that need to go away' on it, but he wants to have them go away this single year. That’s something that, in the past--in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, Congress voted on and reduced $9 billion of current year spending. So it already passed into law, Congress had a vote on it, pulled that spending out. The president has now actually sent another rescission over— we could do the exact same thing again, have the vote in the House and in the Senate, go through the process, that’s the lawful way to be able to do this. There is also a theory that is out there that there doesn’t have to be a vote on this--this has literally never been tested. The Government Accountability Office has said that that’s not legal to undo spending that’s already in law, so this is going to head to the courts again. My encouragement is, let’s bring this up in the House and the Senate, let’s have a vote, let’s make it very, very clear what is appropriate, what’s consistent with law and not have to go through the court system on this, to be able to determine, can they do a “pocket” rescission and is that lawful because that’s not been done before."

"It is Congress‘s responsibility, yes, this is the constitutional responsibility of Article One, is to be able to determine the budget, to work through to be able to make law. So, the president signs that law--it is law once the House, the Senate, and the president sign it, it’s law. It’s what is required to be done. For me, I look at it and say there are a lot of unanswered questions about how do we reduce spending and what does that look like. There have been times before where programs happened, but at the end of that program, money was not spent; the question is what happens to that money that was not spent because that program just didn’t require those kind of funds. This is a case where the president has said this is a previous president’s budget that’s in place, and I don’t think this is appropriate spending for the American people to be able to do. And so the president's just saying I’m not going to do that spending that a previous president requested, got through Congress, got passed, and now this president's says, 'don’t want to do it'--that’s the part that’s untested in the courts, that he’s gonna push to say let’s see if we can find out."