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Trump Bid to Block $4.9 Billion With 'Pocket Rescission' Blasted as 'Authoritarianism 101'
"Congress—and only Congress—passes budgets. Because the president's job is to take care the laws are faithfully executed, he must spend the money as directed," said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar.
Aug 30, 2025
Democracy defenders and members of Congress are condemning US President Donald Trump's effort to use a "pocket rescission" process to block $4.9 billion in foreign aid as authoritarian and illegal.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Friday shared on social media Trump's letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) about the move. According to a White House fact sheet linked in a subsequent post, much of the money was headed for the US Department of State and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which Trump has gutted.
As The Associated Press explained:
The 1974 Impoundment Control Act gives the president the authority to propose canceling funds approved by Congress. Congress can within 45 days vote on pulling back the funds or sustaining them, but by proposing the rescission so close to September 30 the White House argues that the money won’t be spent and the funding lapses.
What was essentially the last pocket rescission occurred in 1977 by Democratic then-President Jimmy Carter, and the Trump administration argues it's a legally permissible tool despite some murkiness as Carter had initially proposed the clawback well ahead of the 45-day deadline.
Shortly after the OMB social media posts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that OMB Director Russ Vought was helping shutter USAID, writing on the platform X: "Since January, we've saved the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. And with a small set of core programs moved over to the State Department, USAID is officially in closeout mode. Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails. Congrats, Russ."
Meanwhile, Rubio's former congressional colleagues and others are sounding the alarm over the administration's effort.
"America is staring down next month's government funding deadline on September 30," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). "It's clear neither Trump nor congressional Republicans have any plan to avoid a painful and entirely unnecessary shutdown. With Trump's illegal 'pocket rescission': They seem eager to inflict further pain on the American people, raising their healthcare costs, compromising essential services, and further damaging our national security."
Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) also put pressure on GOP lawmakers, saying that "this is wrong—and illegal. Not only is Trump gutting $5 billion in foreign aid that saves lives and advances America's interests, but he's doing so using an unlawful 'pocket recission' method that undermines Congress' power of the purse. I urge my Republican colleagues to say hell no."
While most Republicans on Capitol Hill have backed Trump's endeavors to claw back funding previously appropriated by Congress, GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) voted against his $9 billion rescission package earlier this year.
Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, also spoke out against Trump's new move, noting in a Friday statement that under the US Constitution, Congress has "the power of the purse," and the Government Accountability Office "has concluded that this type of rescission is unlawful and not permitted by the Impoundment Control Act."
Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a constitutional scholar, similarly stressed that "Congress—and only Congress—passes budgets. Because the president's job is to take care the laws are faithfully executed, he must spend the money as directed. Trump's 'pocket recissions' are lawless and absurd. If a president opposes legislative spending decisions, he can veto them, subject to override, but once passed, he must execute on them."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, declared in a Friday statement that with the pocket rescission move, the Trump administration "demonstrated yet again its contempt for Congress' power of the purse and the Constitution's separation of powers."
"With this Constitution-mocking action, the administration is bringing us closer to a shutdown on September 30, and it doesn't seem to care," Gilbert said. "We call on Congress to push back, pass and abide by appropriations packages, and fight the administration’s illegal impoundments that harm regular Americans."
"This is not just a constitutional crisis, it's a matter of global justice," she added. "The congressionally appropriated funds that the Trump administration illegally aims to cancel support economic development programs to empower the world's most vulnerable and impoverished, and address some of the ravage of catastrophic climate change in developing nations."
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When Trump Rails Against DC Crime, the Call Is Coming From Inside the House
Why then is the press mesmerized by the declining street crime in DC, luridly inflated by the serial prevaricator, Trump, without so much as a mention of serial White House and K Street crimes?
Aug 23, 2025
US President Donald Trump, always looking to distract attention from his many crimes, has deployed National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officials in Washington, DC. After his usual wild exaggerations about “…violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youths, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” he moves to impose what is becoming his police state over an overwhelmingly Democratic city
As Trump’s troops fan out across more of the city, they are told to be aggressive, take credit for arrests made by the local DC police force, and arbitrarily interrogate DC residents, for example, people waiting at bus stops, minding their own business.
Trump, during his first and current terms, rarely stepped out of his limousine to see what DC is like (See James Fallows’ article “What It Actually ‘Feels Like’ in DC” August 13, 2025). He finally visited with a cluster of his police and troops yesterday, passing out “cheeseburgers prepared by the White House chef’s staff and around 100 pizzas from Wiseguy Pizza,” and quickly declared Washington a safer city after less than two weeks of his forces patrolling largely tourist and downtown business areas.
The reaction from DC residents is mostly negative. Business is already slowing for DC restaurants and will only get worse as Trump brings in more National Guard troops from Republican states, paid for by the taxpayers.
Why is the word “crime” never associated with the far greater “crime in the suites” but only with crime in the streets?
Homicides in DC are at a 30-year low. They are far lower than in many cities in the red states headed by white mayors. Trump seems to go after cities that happen to have Black mayors, further illustrating his racist bigotry, along with downplaying slavery and reinstalling Confederate statues and returning Confederate names to military bases.
To be sure, there ARE two grave and deadly ongoing crime waves in DC. One is clearly the violence surging from Trump’s White House, with big weapons and big tax dollars to fund and shield mega-terrorist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slaughtering genocide of civilians in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank.
Trump has continued the “co-belligerency” that former President Joe Biden established with the Israeli regime. Every day, far more babies, children, mothers, and fathers have been killed from this brutal Trump-Netanyahu axis than are killed in a year in DC.
The deliberate cutoff of lifesaving medical, food, and water assistance to millions of the impoverished in less developed countries occurred when Trump illegally closed the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Humanitarian relief groups already count the preventable deaths in the many thousands. Cutting off food and vaccines will have devastating long-term consequences.
Domestically, convicted felon Trump openly violates many criminal statutes and constitutional provisions (See the April 30, 2025, letter to President Trump citing 22 Impeachable Offenses). For example, he daily violates the Anti-Deficiency Act by spending large sums of money NOT appropriated by Congress. He violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of federal property for electoral campaign purposes. (See the June 28, 2023, letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland by me and Bruce Fein.) He glories in obstruction of justice—a felony. His former first-term national security adviser, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir that “obstruction of justice was a way of life at the White House.”
Trump is continuing this offense in his second term with vengeance. He engages in flat-out open extortion in dealing with universities and several large corporate law firms. The list goes on. Recall that Trump said in 2019 that “with Article II, I can do whatever I want as President” and has repeatedly declared that he has never done anything wrong in elective office. It is understandable that scores of psychologists have described him as a dangerous and delusional personality. The worst is yet to come from the egomaniacal Trump.
As for the K Street offices of hundreds of corporate lobbyists, where does one start? They are, along with heaping piles of campaign cash, making sure that neither Congress nor government agencies of the Executive Branch stop the corporate crime wave. The Big Business paymasters spend whatever it takes to ensure that crime in the suites is never aggressively prosecuted.
Read the weekly Corporate Crime Reporter? (Give your library a gift subscription.) For 39 years, it has been reporting documented corporate crimes of violence (toxic pollution, dangerous products, workplace casualties), and economic crimes and thefts from workers, consumers, investors, students, and pensioners.
Imagine the mainstream media reports on more corporate crimes than budget-starved law enforcement can begin to prosecute. Check out “60 Minutes,” the New York Times, Washington Post, AP, Reuters, and even the Wall Street Journal. For enjoyable, factual reading, try the books by Jim Hightower and his regular newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
Hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths occur annually from these violations, and the preventable injuries and illnesses are much larger in number.
Why then is the press mesmerized by the declining street crime in DC, luridly inflated by the serial prevaricator, Trump, without so much as a mention of serial White House and K Street crimes? Why is the word “crime” never associated with the far greater “crime in the suites” but only with crime in the streets? To ask is to answer. Power, money, and greed camouflage the corporate criminal deeds from journalists who do not or are not allowed to see them in plain sight.
We have a political economy steeped in self-deception, taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat and not making the lethal corrosions on peace and justice serious campaign issues in elections. Voters, of course, can end this cowardly silence.
Who will be the first reporter to ask Trump in his many informal gatherings with the press, about these two booming crime scenes representing the Oligarchy and the Plutocracy?
When will the reporters and their editors stop wallowing in a cultural rut where common candor requires uncommon courage?
Remember, it’s all in plain sight to behold and then be told.
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Study Finds Cash Transfers Reduce Childhood Deaths by Nearly Half as Trump Cuts Threaten Direct Aid
"This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I've seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty," said one researcher.
Aug 18, 2025
With newly embraced direct cash assistance programs a casualty of the Trump administration's slashes to foreign aid, a study released Monday showed that such direct transfers had a "showstopping result" in reducing child mortality rates in low-income families in the Global South.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) on Monday released a study of cash transfers given to more than 10,000 households in Siaya County, Kenya between 2014-17 by the nonprofit group GiveDirectly.
The group provided $1,000 in three installments—without conditions on how it would be spent—over eight months to the families, covering about 75% of their expenses.
Researchers examined the effects over a decade, completing census surveys and collecting data on households that received the funds versus those that didn't.
Unsurprisingly, and as numerous previous studies have shown, the NBER found that the cash transfers dramatically improved the families' lives, helping them to sustain themselves even amid a drought and the coronavirus pandemic. Economic activity in the 650 villages the researchers examined also improved.
But the dramatic decline in infant and childhood mortality rates "became obvious almost immediately," the New York Times reported, and surprised the researchers and other observers.
"This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I've seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty," Harsha Thirumurthy, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, told the Times.
NBER found that the unconditional cash transfers led to 48% fewer deaths before a child reached age 1 and 45% fewer deaths in children under the age of 5.
The transfers appeared to help mothers take parental leave, with a 51% decline in women performing hard labor in the last months of their pregnancies and the three months after giving birth.
The direct infusion of cash also helped women receive prenatal care they might otherwise not have received.
"I have seen firsthand what it means when an expectant mother can't access timely care," said Dr. Miriam Laker-Oketta, a senior research adviser for GiveDirectly, in a video posted on YouTube by the group about the project's results. "I remember a time when a woman arrived after being in labor for three days. Sadly, by the time she arrived, her baby had already died. Our clinic was nearby, but she never had a prenatal visit where her condition might have been caught early."
Laker-Oketta told the Times that "when you come across an intervention that reduces child mortality by almost a half, you cannot understate the impact."
The research was released four months after US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a press briefing that the Trump administration was terminating a number of foreign assistance awards "because they provided cash-based assistance, which the administration is moving away from given concerns about misuse and lack of appropriate accountability for American taxpayers here at home."
That announcement came just six months after the US Agency for International Development (USAID) signaled a long-awaited shift and said it would "include direct monetary transfers to individuals, households, and microenterprises... as a core element of its
development toolkit."
"Critically, transfers respect the dignity of individuals, households, and microenterprises by allowing them to make spending and investing decisions, while also promoting efficient markets such that entire communities and regions, not just recipients benefit. In sum, direct monetary transfers provide USAID with a flexible and localized programming approach to achieve development objectives," said the agency in a position paper last October.
As Daniel Handel, a policy director at the foreign aid think tank Unlock Aid, told NPR this month, the embrace of direct monetary aid at the agency "was largely unheard of" a decade earlier.
"There was an amazing amount of handwringing about the idea," Handel told NPR, with officials concerned about families "misspending" the money. The shift last year was "a real sea change," he added.
As Common Dreams has reported, experts have warned that President Donald Trump's cuts to foreign aid will be a "death sentence for millions of people" in the Global South.
According to a study published in The Lancet last month, "projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4-5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years."
A federal court ruled last week that Trump can move forward with the cuts, including nearly $4 billion in funding for global health programs and more than $6 billion for HIV and AIDS programs.
NBER's study suggested the State Department's plan to abandon cash transfers could be a driving cause of the "death sentence" caused by the cuts; the researchers found that "infant and child mortality largely revert to pre-program levels after cash transfers end."
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