Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Trump's nearly $1 billion pocket rescission reaches $28 million in HHS research grants
President Trump is canceling nearly $1 billion Congress approved, including $28 million in HHS research grants, with five days left in the fiscal year. Congress's auditor calls the tactic illegal, and the Supreme Court's one ruling on it rested on foreign-affairs powers absent from domestic grants.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- President Trump is canceling nearly $1 billion in spending Congress approved, the White House announced Friday, using a rarely used power called a pocket rescission.
- Most of the money comes from HHS programs for refugees and unaccompanied minors, which the administration says are unneeded now that illegal border crossings have fallen.
- The list includes $28 million in HHS research grant funding, plus programs at Education, Justice and HUD and an initiative for minority entrepreneurs.
- The cuts arrived with five days left in the fiscal year, though federal law gives Congress 45 days to review them, and the House is out until after the November election.
- The Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, says pocket rescissions are illegal.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure HHS research grantees who planned around a full-year appropriation can lose the money in the year's final week, and this package shows research lines are on the list.
- constraint Congress's review would not finish until roughly 40 days after the money's fiscal year closes, so the statutory check cannot act in time on this package.
- precedent Moving the tactic from foreign aid to domestic programs tests it where last year's Supreme Court reasoning, built on foreign-affairs authority, may not carry over; if it survives, end-of-year domestic clawbacks become a repeatable budget tool.
Against the whole package, the research cut is small: $28 million is about 3 percent of nearly $1 billion [1]. STAT's report does not say which HHS research programs lose the money [3]. The criteria the White House gave are about what the programs do and who runs them [4][17]. The Office of Management and Budget said the package targets "the most harmful government spending" [16]. The administration called a separate group of HHS grants "outright harmful and blatantly ideological" [4]. Its press release also notes that some of the affected organizations are led by people who worked in the Obama administration [17].
The legal record on this tool is thin. A year ago Trump issued the first pocket rescission in nearly 50 years, blocking $4.9 billion in foreign aid [9]. The Supreme Court declined to block it, saying the president's authority over foreign affairs weighed heavily in its decision [9]. This year the target is domestic spending [10]. The thing that case doesn't tell you is how the Court would treat the same move once the foreign-affairs argument is off the table [9][10]. The administration argues the tool is legal and points to 1977, when President Jimmy Carter carried out what was essentially the last one [11]. Carter, though, proposed his clawback well ahead of the 45-day deadline [11].
For a lab or clinic on an HHS grant, I think the added risk is specific. Research is a small share of this list [1], so the method matters more than the dollar figure. A grant Congress funded for a full year can be pulled in that year's final week, before Congress's review can run [7]. Whether that holds depends on courts accepting a maneuver that Congress's own auditor, the Government Accountability Office, has called illegal [8].
The strongest objection came from the majority party. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and faces a tough reelection campaign, said the action came without warning or consultation [13]. "Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress's appropriations powers," Collins said. "OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding." [12]
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the committee's top Democrat, called the move "theft from the American people, plain and simple" [14]. She said Democrats pushed in recent spending negotiations for language to stop the administration from overriding Congress on spending, and Republicans declined to go along [15].
What to watch
- Whether Collins and other appropriators move to block this rescission or write limits into spending law once the House returns after the November election.
- Whether a grantee or other party challenges the domestic rescission in court, and whether judges treat it differently from last year's foreign-aid case.
- Which HHS research programs make up the $28 million, and how far along their grants were when the cut was announced.