The Trump administration announced on Friday the cancellation of nearly $1 billion in funds approved by Congress, using a rarely employed and highly controversial legal mechanism to eliminate immigrant service programs, diversity initiatives, and other allocations that the White House labeled as the most detrimental government spending.
The measure was formalized through a letter from the president to the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, notifying 11 rescissions of budget authority totaling 810 million dollars, although the overall amount with additional allocations approaches 1,000 million.
The bulk of the cuts —567 million dollars— impacts the Refugee and Entrant Assistance Fund of the Department of Health and Human Services, intended for programs for refugees, asylum seekers, and unaccompanied minors.
The White House argued that those funds are surplus due to the success of its border policies, which have drastically reduced irregular crossings.
Among the eliminated allocations are also 25 million for educational programs for migrant students from the Department of Education, 15 million from the pilot program for alternatives to detention by the Department of Homeland Security, 10 million from the citizenship and integration program of USCIS, 15 million from the Community Relations Service of the Department of Justice —an agency already dissolved by the administration itself—, 10 million from the Minority Business Development Agency, and about 9 million from a Treasury program that provided debt forgiveness to foreign countries in exchange for climate investments.
The maneuver employed, known as "pocket rescission," involves sending a notification of fund cancellation to Congress so close to the end of the fiscal year that the legal 45-day period for legislative review expires before the money needs to be disbursed.
Trump resorted to this mechanism for the first time in almost 50 years in 2025, when he blocked $4.9 billion in foreign aid approved by Congress. This time, he is targeting domestic spending, marking an escalation in the conflict between the Executive and Legislative branches over control of the federal budget.
The Office of Government Accountability, a branch of Congress, has deemed that pocket rescissions are illegal under the Impoundment Control and Budget Act of 1974.
Trump announced the cuts with only five days left in the fiscal year and with the House out of session, making any legislative review practically impossible.
The reaction in Congress was unusually bipartisan. Republican Senator Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the action illegal and warned that she would work with colleagues to address "these illegal actions."
"Not only does the delay itself constitute an unreported impoundment to Congress, but it is also an encroachment on Congress's appropriation powers," Collins stated. "The Office of Management and Budget is an agency of the executive branch. It is not up to them to decide which programs deserve funding."
The Democratic Senator Patty Murray, the minority leader on the same committee, was even more direct in describing the measure as "a theft from the American people, plain and simple."
"These are funds that Congress approved in a bipartisan manner and should be helping people, not being canceled by a president more focused on building a ballroom than on investing in families," he added.
The rescission is part of a broader pattern of the Trump administration aimed at cutting federal programs for immigrants, which includes executive orders, fund freezes, and multiple legal battles.
At the beginning of this week, a federal judge permanently annulled a 2025 directive that restricted immigrants' access to programs such as Head Start and community clinics.
The Supreme Court declined to block Trump's first pocket veto in 2025, arguing that presidential authority in foreign policy influenced its decision, although it did not definitively resolve the legality of the mechanism.
Now, with the focus on domestic spending, the courts will need to determine whether the same logic applies when the funds canceled benefit individuals within U.S. territory.
Related videos:
Filed under: