Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times/Redux
Elon Musk’s departure from DOGE signals a winding down of the Trump administration’s most notorious scheme for blowing up the federal bureaucracy and generating savings to be used for tax-cut goodies (though DOGE itself will live on, in part via Musk staffers now embedded in federal agencies). But there are alternative plans in motion to continue or confirm the disruptions. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill aims to cut key safety-net spending programs like Medicaid and SNAP over the long haul. The one-year appropriations measures that will fund most federal operations for the fiscal year beginning in October are now under construction in the House and Senate and will probably be voted upon after the budget reconciliation bill passes. Trump’s own budget, written by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, provides a template that includes an average spending cut of 23 percent for domestic programs.
But that won’t help Team Trump implement current-year spending cuts of the sort DOGE attempted to make by sheer (and in many cases, blatantly illegal) force. For that, Vought has an entirely legal procedure at his disposal: spending “rescissions.” This is the term for clawbacks of previously appropriated spending that take effect if both the House and the Senate approve them within 45 days. Theoretically, Vought could take the whole list of proposed DOGE cuts, along with the funding freezes and payroll deductions OMB and agency heads have advanced, into a giant rescission package that would “ratify” all the carnage initiated by executive fiat, making a lot of the judicial challenges to the administration’s power grabs moot.
Given the narrow Republican margin of control in Congress and everyone’s preoccupation with the budget reconciliation bill, Vought has moved cautiously. But now he’s formally proposing a first set of “rescissions,” a $9.3 billion clawback of money for programs conservatives love to hate and that have already been ravaged by DOGE. The package focuses on shutting down most of USAID and other foreign-aid programs, as well as gutting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its allegedly liberal outlets NPR and PBS.
Everyone in the administration is acutely aware that when Trump proposed a $15 billion rescission package in 2018 (the last time Republicans controlled both House and Senate), the Senate rejected it (one of the two Republican senators who helped kill it, Susan Collins, is still around). It’s significant that Vought waited until the Big Beautiful Bill was passed by the House before pulling the trigger on rescissions, and then moved quickly, quite possibly as a gift to fiscal hawks who voted for the bill despite loud misgivings. It can best be understood as a trial balloon: If this package is quickly enacted, others can and almost certainly will be proposed. And there’s even a trick Vought is threatening to pull just as current-year appropriations run out in the fall that could represent a real coup, as Politico reported:
Over the last week, Vought has ramped up this rhetoric, repeatedly talking about using a controversial tactic known as a “pocket recission” to defy Congress’ funding directives. Using such a maneuver later this summer, he contends, would let the White House make all of the DOGE cuts permanent, regardless of support or disapproval from Congress.
To do that, the Trump administration would have to send additional recissions requests in the final weeks of the fiscal year, which runs through September. Even if lawmakers vote to approve or reject the requests, the White House could let the funding expire by withholding it through Sept. 30.
The “pocket rescission” gambit reflects Vought’s ultimate position that the administration should be able to unilaterally impound (i.e., refuse to release) appropriated funds if the president deems it necessary to control spending. He’s not closing off that possibility either, though the courts are unlikely to go along with his claim that the strict limits on impoundment enacted by Congress in 1974 after Richard Nixon tried to withhold appropriations are unconstitutional.
The bottom line is that with Musk gone, it’s clearer than ever that Vought is the quarterback of Team Trump’s effort to gut the “deep state” and turn it into a pure MAGA instrument through mass firings and hirings of loyalists. Unlike the DOGE edgelord, this grim Christian nationalist wonk knows the federal government and its budget like the palm of his hand and will go as far to get control of them as his erratic boss will allow.
