On Sunday, Biden told members of Congress that his administration is planning on reversing Trump’s $27.4 billion freeze on various governmental programs.
According to the House Committee on the Budget, “While the U.S. Constitution broadly grants Congress the power of the purse, the President – through the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and executive agencies – is responsible for the actual spending of funds.”
Trump had halted spending of congressionally-appropriated funds, which had kept that money from being directed towards programs Trump had disagreed with.
The process by which Trump was able to accomplish this is called “recision.” The House Committee on the budget explains it this way, “A 2018 Government Accountability Office legal opinion holds that if the President proposes a rescission, he or she must make the affected funds available to be prudently obligated before the funds expire, even if the 45-day clock is still running. This means, for example, that the President cannot strategically time a rescission request for late in the fiscal year and withhold the funding until it expires, thus achieving a rescission without Congressional approval.”
In his announcement, Biden wrote, “I am withdrawing 73 proposed rescissions previously transmitted to the Congress.”
The reversal of spending means that many recipients will receive funding including, “The withdrawals are for the Department of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, and the Treasury, as well as the African Development Foundation, the Commission of Fine Arts, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the District of Columbia, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Inter-American Foundation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the Peace Corps, the Presidio Trust, the United States Agency for International Development, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Legislative Branch.”
