The Government Accountability Office has rejected the administration’s attempt to use the end of the fiscal year as a substitute for congressional approval.
In a September 29 legal opinion, GAO concluded that President Donald Trump could not withhold more than $800 million in appropriated funds until the money expired on September 30, 2026, while Congress was still considering a rescission request. The opinion does not decide whether the targeted programs are well designed or whether Congress should continue funding them. It addresses a narrower question with broader consequences: whether the executive branch can make Congress’s spending authority ineffective through timing.
The administration sent Congress a special message on September 25 proposing rescissions from 11 appropriation accounts. The package covered programs involving refugee and entrant assistance, migrant education, higher education, health research, minority-health initiatives, housing counseling and other activities. The White House presented the cuts as a response to spending it considered wasteful, unnecessary or inconsistent with administration priorities.
Those arguments belong in a congressional debate. The constitutional problem begins when the executive branch tries to settle that debate by allowing the money to disappear before Congress has completed the process established by law.
The calendar was the mechanism
The relevant statute is the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It allows a president to ask Congress to rescind, or permanently cancel, previously appropriated funds. It also permits temporary withholding while Congress considers the request.
That authority is not unlimited. Congress has a period to consider the proposal, and the funds must generally remain available unless Congress completes action on a rescission bill. In this case, GAO said the congressional consideration period would end no earlier than November 9—well after the September 30 expiration of the fiscal-year funds.
That gap is the entire theory behind a so-called pocket rescission. A request arrives close enough to the end of the fiscal year that Congress cannot finish acting before the funds expire. The administration can then argue that it did not technically cancel the money; it merely withheld it until the legal deadline passed.
GAO has rejected that reasoning before. In a 2018 appropriations-law decision, the agency concluded that the Impoundment Control Act does not allow the executive branch to hold funds through their expiration date simply because a rescission request remains under consideration.
In its 2026 opinion, GAO relied on the statute’s language, the law’s legislative history, Supreme Court precedent and the constitutional structure governing appropriations. Its conclusion was direct: the president may ask Congress to rescind money, but may not force the expiration of budget authority that Congress enacted and did not rescind.
This is not a ruling on the programs
That distinction matters because the targeted programs are politically contested. The administration may believe that some accounts are overfunded, duplicative or directed toward priorities it rejects. Congress may agree with some of those criticisms. Congress may also disagree and refuse to approve the proposed cancellations.
GAO’s opinion does not remove either option. It preserves the institutional procedure by which the decision is made.
Rachel Bennett recently examined the practical consequences of the rescission proposal for schools, clinics and community organizations. Her reporting showed why the funding dispute matters locally: when federal support becomes uncertain, the work does not necessarily stop. It may move to school counselors, nonprofit staff, health providers or families without any corresponding transfer of money or legal responsibility.
This article concerns the preceding question. Who has the authority to decide whether that work should continue?
If the answer is that an administration can submit a rescission request five days before the end of the fiscal year and withhold the funds until they expire, then Congress’s power of the purse remains formally intact but practically weakened. Lawmakers could vote against the rescission and still find that the money is gone.
GAO is not a court
GAO’s conclusion is significant, but it is not a judicial injunction. The agency is Congress’s auditing and investigative arm, and its Office of General Counsel issues authoritative appropriations-law decisions. It does not possess the same direct enforcement mechanism as a federal court.
That leaves several questions unresolved. The administration could comply with the opinion, contest it, seek judicial support for its position or continue withholding funds while litigation develops. Congress could pass a rescission bill approving some or all of the proposed cuts. Agencies may also need to determine how much unobligated budget authority remained in each account and whether any money can still be used responsibly after the deadline.
GAO’s opinion says the funds must be made available for obligation in sufficient time for prudent use. That is not the same as saying agencies can spend every dollar immediately. Competitive grants, contracts and other programs require notice, review and administrative processing. A legal restoration of authority may therefore come after some practical opportunities have already been lost.
Nor does the opinion establish that every dollar in the $810 million package was available for new obligations. Some amounts may already have been obligated, apportioned differently or affected by agency action. The account-level records will matter more than the headline figure when the consequences are measured.
The precedent is larger than this package
The most important feature of the dispute is that its logic is portable.
A future president could use the same timing strategy against funding for programs favored by today’s administration. The targeted accounts could involve defense, infrastructure, disaster relief, agricultural support or law enforcement rather than refugee assistance, migrant education or health research. The constitutional issue would be unchanged.
Congress can approve spending that a president considers unwise. A president can ask Congress to reverse that decision. What the executive branch cannot do, under GAO’s interpretation of the law, is create a third option in which Congress retains formal authority but loses the practical opportunity to exercise it.
That is why the September 29 opinion deserves more attention than the partisan arguments surrounding the individual programs. The central question is not whether the money was wisely appropriated. It is whether the institution that appropriated it remains the institution that decides whether it should be withdrawn.
GAO has clarified its answer. The next test will be whether the administration, Congress or the courts give that answer practical force.
