Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has encountered repeated legal setbacks as a result of its efforts to shrink the federal workforce, cut costs, and reshape the executive branch. Part of the challenge that the administration faces is a constitutional one—Congress, not the executive or judicial branches, is vested with the power of the purse. This means that congressional action is unavoidable if the administration wants to deliver substantial, lasting savings.
To add legitimacy to DOGE’s efforts to cut spending and encourage Congress to take responsibility, the president should submit a rescissions package (or multiple) under the Impoundment Control Act that officially requests Congress to cancel certain spending.
Once a regular feature of the budget process, presidents across both parties used to routinely submit rescission packages to Congress, which recommended the cancellation of already appropriated spending. Reviving these rescission packages would be a return to responsible fiscal governance, realizing DOGE cost savings and ensuring courts do not roll back the administration’s actions.
Below, we detail the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) rescissions process, its historical track record, and the path forward.
Rescissions 101
Under the ICA, Congress established a special, expedited process to accelerate the cancellation of previously approved spending. This budget process, known as rescission, allows the president to propose cancelling specific spending by submitting a detailed request to Congress. This starts a 45-day shot clock, during which the president can legally pause congressionally approved spending, and the legislature considers the rescission request. Notably, this process only requires a simple majority in both chambers, bypassing the Senate filibuster. If approved and signed by the president, this spending is legally cancelled.
In prior decades, presidents and Congress used this presidentially initiated rescissions process, in combination with congressionally initiated rescissions, to achieve modest savings.
The Track Record on Presidential Rescissions
According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, presidentially proposed rescissions were once a more common feature of the budget process but have since become less prevalent. That’s unfortunate given that lawmakers used to save taxpayers billions of dollars using the process. As the graph below shows, Congress and the president jointly cancelled roughly $152 billion in budget authority over three decades (1974—2003). These modest savings deserve recognition, in part because they demonstrate that Congress, together with the president, can actually cut spending if lawmakers put their minds to it.
While Presidents Ford and Carter both proposed a series of small rescissions, Reagan demonstrated that presidentially initiated rescissions were a viable mechanism to achieve major spending cuts. In 1981, Reagan requested $15 billion be rescinded—roughly a 4 percent cut to discretionary budget authority at the time. While Congress did not approve all his cuts, they did eventually enact nearly $15 billion in rescissions that year and approved another $5 billion in cuts in 1982.
In subsequent years, most rescissions were initiated by Congress rather than presidents. Granted, both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton successfully leveraged presidentially proposed rescissions, and each oversaw the enactment of significant rescission packages during their administrations. Clinton, the last president to have a budget surplus in his administration, was also the last president to have a presidentially initiated rescission enacted. In total, Congress approved roughly $25 billion in presidential rescission requests across five administrations but enacted a much larger $152 billion in total rescissions across the same period.
It’s worth noting an important limitation built into the presidentially proposed rescissions process: the president can only request rescissions to discretionary spending. Because discretionary spending accounts for just over a quarter of all federal spending, it limits potential savings from pursuing rescissions. Still, with discretionary budget authority at $1.6 trillion per year and counting, neither the president nor Congress has any excuse to sidestep much-needed spending restraint, and ICA rescissions remain an important tool to bring rampant, wasteful spending under control.
Why Hasn’t Trump Proposed a Rescission?
Given the administration’s stated cost-cutting enthusiasm with DOGE and the OMB, it is surprising that the administration has not proposed an ICA rescission package. After all, it was the Trump administration in 2018 that proposed the first rescission package to Congress since Clinton, requesting $15 billion in cuts (just 1 percent of discretionary budget authority). While the House narrowly approved this proposal, it ultimately failed in the Senate, with two Republicans defecting. This failure might deter the administration today. If Congress didn’t have the appetite for cuts then, why try now? Additionally, there is reportedly some internal debate over the constitutionality of the ICA itself, likely reducing interest in the rescissions process.
Arguably, the current political landscape is more favorable for a presidential rescissions package than it was in 2018. The budget is bloated from a pandemic spending spree. Meanwhile, high bond yields, inflation, and DOGE have helped generate a national conversation about the need for spending cuts. While it is true that Republicans have a slimmer House majority, the most recent budget framework is evidence that the House is actively identifying spending cuts. And compared to 2018, Republicans have an extra two senators that could make a rescission package politically feasible.
There is no time like the present to cut spending, and it helps to have an administration that throws its weight behind a spending cuts package. As Rollcall’s David Lerman has reported, legislators have expressed frustration about “being kept in the dark as departments and agencies fire workers.” A presidentially proposed rescission package could build political support for DOGE’s spending cuts and workforce reductions by bringing transparency to the current process, involving legislators directly, and pursuing cuts via a legal and lasting mechanism.
Optimistically, Elon Musk recently expressed openness to the idea of presidentially proposed rescissions during a lunch with Republican senators (it doesn’t appear Musk was aware of the ICA process prior to the lunch). As Sen. Rand Paul (R‑KY) rightly argued, the administration should consider clawing back hundreds of billions in already appropriated funds through rescissions, something that could “make those of us who are skeptical about reconciliation, adding to the debt, […] be a little bit more open to it if we’re actually going to … make the spending cuts real and permanent.”
The Path Forward
Moving forward, DOGE and the administration should actively collaborate with Congress and regularly submit rescission packages to cancel wasteful and inappropriate spending. The administration could break these rescission requests into multiple smaller packages, following the agency-by-agency approach of DOGE, or they could submit a single, comprehensive rescissions package covering a wide array of policy areas. Either approach could add pressure for Congress to rise to the occasion and govern responsibly, bringing transparency, legitimacy, and permanence to an executive cost-cutting process that has otherwise been characterized by its secrecy, chaos, and policy whiplash.
As Elon Musk has noted, the federal government is a “target-rich environment” for cuts. We agree. It’s now time to put pen to paper and codify those cuts into law. Rescission packages are just the tool to do so.
