Having prevailed in mid-July on party-line congressional votes to slash foreign assistance and zero-out public broadcasting, senior Trump administration officials immediately signaled intent to seek still more “rescissions” of money already appropriated for the current fiscal year. Even more provocatively, they are discussing plans to engage in the cuts by flagrantly sidestepping Congress. All this comes against a backdrop of the administration’s quiet withholding or slow-walking of billions of dollars for programs ranging from Head Start to medical research.

This mad rush to defund public programs is deeply irresponsible. These programs serve real purposes that the administration has ignored in its haste to slash domestic spending. Comedians poked fun at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency when it had to scramble to rehire the fired workers who keep our nuclear weapons safe. This willful ignorance took a tragic turn when the National Weather Service’s Texas offices were left understaffe d as catastrophic flooding and hurricane season approached. The Lancet medical journal published a study finding that the administration’s rapid-fire foreign aid cuts will lead to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if they continue.

The White House defunding marathon is also illegal. President Nixon tried very much the same thing, withholding appropriated funds from programs he disliked. Every court that considered the merits of his impoundments found them unlawful, including a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court. The president can veto spending legislation he finds excessive, but he may not sign an appropriations act and then simply refuse to implement it or appropriations signed into law before his administration.

The Supreme Court made the same point again in 1998 when it struck down the Line Item Veto Act. This law authorized the president to sign funding legislation and then designate parts not to be implemented. The justices held that this was tantamount to allowing the president to amend a law, which only Congress may do. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority.

Congress opposed Nixon’s impoundments on a bipartisan basis. It did, however, give future presidents an expedited method for asking Congress to rescind funds. This Impoundment Control Act requires that Congress be notified immediately whenever the president thinks funds should not be spent and ensures Congress’ timely consideration.

Unfortunately, President Trump has ignored the Impoundment Control Act’s mandate to promptly notify as he has withheld billions of dollars for months. In fact, in March, Trump signed a bipartisan appropriations act for the remainder of this fiscal year, and then impounded large parts of the spending he had just approved.

When he finally requested congressional approval of a small fraction of his impoundments in June, Democrats understandably cried foul. The final fiscal year appropriations act had passed only because Democrats voted for it, and they did so to properly fund these and other programs.

Bipartisan appropriations bills torn apart, after they’ve been signed into law, by party-lines rescission bills is a prescription for gridlock: Nobody is going to make a deal in the future with those who blithely go back on their word. But the administration was not done.

Now Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is planning “pocket rescissions.” His idea is to ask Congress to rescind funds imminently due for disbursement so late in the fiscal year that the funding will expire before Congress can act. He assumes that the Impoundment Control Act authorizes the president to withhold the dollars while Congress considers this bad-faith request. But the act says just the opposite: “Nothing contained in this Act … shall be construed as … superseding any provision of law which requires the obligation of budget authority or the making of outlays thereunder.” Unless the president can persuade Congress to change programs’ funding laws, these impoundments are just as illegal as Nixon’s, which the Supreme Court ruled against unanimously.

Some may feel the Vought-Trump rescissions are unavoidable now that the president’s tax cut bill has torn a huge hole in the deficit. But the scale is not remotely comparable. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s” upper-income tax cuts add$3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. The rescission package that slashed foreign assistance and zeroed out public broadcasting reduced the deficit by about $8.4 billion over the same period.

If Congress passed a rescission bill of a comparable size every week for the remainder of the Trump term — taking no recesses or so-called district work periods — the decreased spending would make up less than half of the deficit increase. And long before it reached that point, Congress would run out of programs that even the most zealous budget cutters could get away with rescinding out of existence.

The two parties should return to the bargaining table and negotiate funding bills for next year. If either Republicans or Democrats have evidence that programs are overfunded or not working, bring that to the negotiations. But once a deal is struck, both sides need to honor it. The administration’s capricious and chaotic impoundments have done more than enough damage already.

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David A. Super is a professor of law at Georgetown Law.

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