President Donald Trump has moved to cancel $5 billion in foreign aid already approved by Congress, a step that has inflamed partisan tensions and heightened the risk of a federal shutdown at the end of September.
In a letter to the House of Representatives, Trump said the cuts would affect programs run by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The White House Office of Management and Budget defended the move on Friday, declaring the president “will always put AMERICA FIRST.”
USAID, once the government’s flagship development agency, has been dramatically downsized since Trump returned to office in January. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has overseen the agency’s integration into the State Department, cut 85 percent of its programming. He welcomed the president’s latest action as a step toward “rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse,” noting that some of the funding had gone toward global LGBTQ awareness initiatives.
Democrats, however, condemned Trump’s maneuver — known as a pocket rescission — as unlawful. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the tactic “makes clear neither Trump nor Congressional Republicans have any plan to avoid a painful and entirely unnecessary shutdown.”
Even some moderate Republicans expressed unease at the prospect of the White House clawing back funds already approved by lawmakers.
With Republicans holding both chambers of Congress but lacking the Democratic votes needed to pass new spending bills in the Senate, negotiations are expected to be fraught in the weeks ahead. Democrats have warned that any reversal of appropriated funds would effectively doom talks to avert a shutdown after September 30, when the fiscal year ends.
The U.S. narrowly avoided a shutdown in March. Such stoppages are rare but costly: national parks and monuments close, food inspections pause, and hundreds of thousands of federal workers are furloughed while others — from police to air traffic controllers — work without pay until funding resumes.
