Andy Kroll

It had passed a law that accounted for this money to go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to go to foreign aid programs.

And now the White House said to Congress, we want you to take a vote on rescinding that money, zeroing it out.

The thing that is striking to me is that Vote tried to do this in the first Trump administration when he had a similar role at the Office of Management and Budget, and ultimately he was the director at the end of the first Trump administration.

They sent a massive rescissions request in the first Trump administration to Congress, and Congress said no.

Congress narrowly defeated this measure, and it was seen back then as the legislative branch exerting its will, kind of standing up for itself and saying, we write the laws, we appropriate the money, we don't support you, the White House, coming over here and telling us to undo work that we've already done, the negotiations, the compromises, the dealmaking.

Fast forward to this summer, vote goes back to the toolkit and sends another rescission request to Congress for Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, for USAID foreign aid funding, and this time...

It passes.

Congress votes to rescind this money.

And the effects of that, of course, have been pretty devastating for the programs and agencies affected.

But then a few months later, the vote takes an even more aggressive step in the same direction.

He issues what he has called a pocket rescission order.

What that essentially means is it's a request that went to Congress and said, we want to rescind even more money.

And this time it was about $5 billion, again, targeting foreign aid.

But what Vote essentially told Congress was, I don't need your vote.

I don't need you at all to rescind this money.

Because the way the law works, Congress has a 45-day period to consider one of these rescission requests, to consider, again, whether to undo work it had already done or

Vote sent this request down Pennsylvania Avenue so close to the end of the fiscal year for Congress that he said, I don't need your support.

The clock is going to run out and the money will go away.

That is a maneuver that's largely seen as not legal.

Republicans in Congress said as much to vote, but by all indications, he was undaunted by this.