Pocket Rescission Is a Line-Item Veto. Put It on the Books.

By the first week of September 2026, none of the twelve annual appropriations bills has reached the President's desk, and the fiscal year ends in three weeks. This is not a crisis. It is Tuesday. The last time Congress passed all twelve on time, Bill Clinton was finishing his first term, and every September since has produced some version of the same ritual: a continuing resolution, a shutdown threat, a last-minute omnibus nobody read before voting on it, and a great deal of speechmaking about dysfunction from the members casting the vote.

Into that vacuum has walked something with a real name and a real history: impoundment. The Office of Management and Budget, under a director who has been unusually candid about his theory of the office, has leaned on a maneuver called the pocket rescission — sending Congress a request to cancel spending in the final forty-five days of the fiscal year, so that even if Congress does nothing, the money simply expires unspent when the clock runs out. The Government Accountability Office has called versions of this illegal. The administration has proceeded anyway, on the theory that when Congress abdicates the specifics, the executive is entitled to fill in the blanks.

Here is the case for that theory, stated as its proponents actually make it, not as a caricature. Appropriations bills are often written by staff nobody elected, stuffed with riders nobody debated, and passed by members who could not tell you what is in them if their seats depended on it — and sometimes their seats do depend on it, which is worse. If the legislative branch has effectively stopped legislating on spending in any granular, deliberate way, then someone has to exercise judgment about what actually gets spent, and the Constitution puts the person who executes the budget in the executive branch for a reason. An OMB director who cancels a wasteful earmark that Congress never meant to fund with any real scrutiny is not usurping the legislature. He is doing the job the legislature stopped doing.

I understand the appeal of that argument better than I'd like to. My father spent thirty years on a shop floor whose survival depended on decisions made in Washington by people who never had to look him in the eye, and there is something almost satisfying about the idea of one person finally saying no to the machine on the public's behalf. But satisfaction is not a constitutional category, and the argument fails for the reason every argument for concentrated discretion eventually fails: it only works if you trust the discretion, and trust is not a renewable resource in American politics.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was not an accident of Watergate-era overreaction. Richard Nixon impounded funds for clean water projects and highway construction that Congress had appropriated and he had signed into law, on the theory that his judgment about waste superseded the statute. Congress passed the ICA specifically to close that door — to say that if a president wants to cancel appropriated spending, he must ask Congress, in writing, and Congress must say yes within forty-five days, or the money gets spent as written.

That is the whole mechanism. The pocket rescission is not a clever use of that law; it is a way of running out the clock the law was built to prevent.

And the trouble with cheering the maneuver because you like this administration's targets is that the maneuver does not come with a partisan lock on it. The next president who inherits this theory of the office will not necessarily use it to cancel foreign aid line items a lot of voters found dubious anyway. She might use it to zero out a border wall appropriation, or a weapons program, on the same theory: Congress wrote it sloppily, I know better, forty-five days is a technicality. If the power is legitimate when your side holds it, it is legitimate when the other side holds it. That is the entire discipline of constitutional argument, and it is the discipline the current defenders of pocket rescission are asking you to abandon for the length of one news cycle.

None of this excuses Congress. An institution that cannot pass its own budget on time in thirty years has forfeited a great deal of its standing to complain when the executive fills the silence — the same way a family that never balances its checkbook has forfeited some standing to complain about the bank's overdraft fees. But forfeiting standing to complain is different from forfeiting the law, and the ICA remains the law until Congress repeals it, whatever OMB's lawyers currently argue in their memos.

There is an honest fix here, and it does not require anyone to trust anyone's discretion. If OMB believes specific appropriations are wasteful, the ICA already gives it a tool: send the rescission request early enough that Congress has to vote on it, in the open, on the record, with time left on the clock either way. Make members go on record defending the earmark or cutting it. That is not slower government. It is government that has to answer for itself, which is the only kind the founders were interested in building.

Congress abdicated the purse one continuing resolution at a time, and now an OMB director is treating that abdication as an invitation. He may even be right about some of the line items. But the Constitution did not give the executive a line-item veto — the Supreme Court struck down Congress's own attempt to hand him one in Clinton v. City of New York in 1998, on a vote that should embarrass anyone now defending the same power by another name. Put the rescissions on the books, in daylight, on a clock Congress actually has to answer. The alternative is not a leaner government. It is a government where the purse belongs to whoever holds the calendar.