Writting and calling the US Senators about this. We’ve already paid for this money to be disbursed, with the understanding that it will be. This recission is UnAmerican.

Rescission Package Would Sabotage Recent Funding Deal, Cripple Future Ones

July 15, 2025, 1:47 pm

President Trump’s proposal to rescind $9.4 billion in previously approved spending, which the Senate is expected to vote on this week, is a bad idea for several reasons, as noted in a recent CBPP report. The rescission package would significantly damage life-saving global health programs, peacekeeping efforts, and economic development abroad, and would hurt domestic community TV and radio stations supported by the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. It also builds on the Administration’s broader effort to illegally impound funds, which includes withholding for months the spending that was ultimately included in the rescissions package prior to the formal request and unlawfully delaying or blocking billions of dollars for other programs from going out.

What’s less obvious but no less important, the package — combined with the Administration’s broader campaign of illegally impounding funds — could also make it far more difficult for Congress to fund the government in a bipartisan way in the future.

Here’s why:

Most of the funds in the rescission package were enacted in March legislation that was passed by Congress — including on a bipartisan basis in the Senate — and signed into law by the President to fund the government for the rest of fiscal year 2025. To provide the 60 votes required to avoid a Senate filibuster, at least eight Democratic senators needed to join with 52 Republican senators to invoke cloture on the funding bill.

But presidential rescission requests operate under different rules and require only 51 votes to pass the Senate, so no Democratic votes are needed. If the Senate approves the package (which passed the House on a party-line vote), this would show that Republicans could quickly revise on a partisan basis, with merely 51 votes in the Senate, a bipartisan funding agreement reached only a few months earlier that required support from no fewer than 60 senators.

Nothing has changed about the provisions in the package since the funding was approved in March. They are simply policies President Trump has long opposed and doesn’t want to carry out. But that is not a justification for a rescissions request. After all, it’s typical in an appropriations deal that no one gets everything they want. That means congressional negotiators may get more or less funding than they prefer for a given agency; it also means the Administration may be required to implement programs it does not support.

But if Senate Republicans go along with the Administration’s efforts to simply remove spending they had earlier agreed to as part of the March deal, this would undermine the ability to strike future deals. Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has also indicated that the Administration “will strongly consider” sending further rescissions requests to Congress. And of course, the trust needed to make these deals is further undermined when the Administration also chooses to withhold money illegally without even submitting a rescissions package.

The result would likely be lasting damage to our ability to fund the government in a bipartisan way, and the consequences will become clearer in just the next few months. Enacting appropriations for fiscal year 2026, which starts October 1, will require Democratic senators to join with Republicans to reach the needed 60-vote threshold. This Democratic support may not materialize if Democrats believe the President and congressional Republicans will later undo, by rescission or impoundment, any agreement they sign onto.

More generally, there’s little reason for the minority party in Congress to agree to a deal when the Administration and the majority party can strip away funding they don’t like in a purely partisan way, or if the Administration may attempt unilaterally — and illegally — not to implement it at all, with no pushback from the majority party in Congress. As a result, it would be far more difficult to reach the bipartisan agreements necessary to fund the government on time and with the resources required to serve the country’s needs.

Senators should keep those consequences in mind as they consider the President’s current rescission request.

Topics: 

Federal Budget