The Trump administration is using a mechanism widely viewed as illegal to cancel nearly $100 million Congress appropriated for expanding college-level foreign-language instruction and helping transient U.S. agricultural workers get GEDs and go to college.
The White House late Friday announced a package of $810 million in “pocket rescissions”—essentially, overriding congressional appropriations so late in the fiscal year that lawmakers won’t have time to intervene before the funding expires on Sept. 30.
The list includes two U.S. Department of Education line items: $70 million of the $85 million lawmakers approved in February for International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE), and $25 million of the $52 million budgeted for two programs (the High School Equivalency and College Assistance Migrant programs, or HEP and CAMP) that serve migratory students. Funding for health research, refugee aid, and minority business development are also slated for cancellation.
The Education Department ran grant competitions earlier this year for some of the programs now slated for last-minute funding cuts. The pocket rescissions effectively mean the effort dozens of institutions spent applying for those grants was for naught, and fewer students will be served as a result.
“Nearly all of our students live in rural communities, most of them in poor communities,” said Andrew Dalton, president of the HEP-CAMP Association, a nonprofit advocacy group. “Most of our students that we serve would not go to college without this program.”
Republican and Democratic senators immediately decried the pocket rescissions announcement. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in a statement Friday called the move an “illegal” effort to “undermine Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.”
“OMB is an agency of the executive branch,” wrote Collins, who chairs her chamber’s appropriations committee, referring to the White House Office of Management and Budget. “It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.”
The White House announcement characterizes the programs targeted for elimination as “wasteful and harmful government spending” that fuels illegal immigration and improper diversity and inclusion initiatives.
In some cases, its descriptions mischaracterize what the programs do. It says HEP-CAMP “subsidizes aliens to come to the U.S. and utilize our education system at the expense of American workers and their children.”
Both programs serve students who travel seasonally within the United States and qualify for federal Migrant Education Program funds through Title I before they graduate from high school. Undocumented immigrants are prohibited from participating.
The White House also cites a grant under HEP-CAMP that went to an organization called Immigrants Rising. The spending database that displays federal grant awards doesn’t show any HEP or CAMP grants awarded to that organization.
“We have no idea where that came from,” Dalton said.
Education programs now in the spotlight have been beleaguered since last year
The Department of Education under President Donald Trump has already telegraphed its disdain for the programs it’s now seeking to diminish.
The administration has twice proposed eliminating annual funding for both line items. Congress in February rejected that request and supplied level year-over-year funding for both for fiscal 2026.
Last year, rather than canceling the fiscal 2025 appropriations for International and Foreign Language Education, the Trump administration abruptly canceled all the active grants for the program in one fell swoop, telling several hundred recipients of previously awarded funds that their projects are “not a priority of the Administration.” Affected grantees included university-based resource centers that provided support for foreign-language instruction to K-12 schools, among others.
Then the department “reprogrammed” the entire $85 million appropriation to grants for historically Black colleges and universities and tribal institutions.
Louis Marinelli, a graduate student in the Russian studies department at Indiana University, in May 2025 secured a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant from the Department of Education that was set to cover a full year’s tuition and health insurance, plus a $20,000 stipend for living expenses.
But a few weeks into the fall 2025 academic year, he learned the agency had canceled his grant. The university eventually found the funds to cover Marinelli’s spring-semester expenses, but he had to take out student loans to pay for the fall-semester expenses he had expected the grant would cover.
“Since then we’ve basically been under the impression that the program itself has been canceled,” Marinelli said.
But it hadn’t—Congress supplied level funding in fiscal 2026. The department didn’t run a FLAS competition this year, but it did solicit applications for another sets of grants under the IFLE umbrella. That competition listing shows the agency expected to give out roughly $10 million; it’s not yet clear whether the department plans to award those funds.
Meanwhile, for HEP and CAMP, competition listings from earlier this year projected the agency would award roughly $25 million across nine different institutions. But advocates said the agency won’t have funding left after the rescission for any new grantees.
Those programs also experienced similar disruptions over the last two years. In 2025, the department canceled planned competitions for new HEP and CAMP awards, and also discontinued more than 40 previously awarded HEP and CAMP grants.
The HEP-CAMP Association sued over those changes and secured a court order for the administration to spend all $52 million appropriated for the programs. But the agreement the agency reached with the plaintiffs also shrank the overall number of awardees, forcing dozens of colleges to close their longstanding programs.
The department instead “frontloaded” some of the existing grantees’ awards, giving them future-year funds upfront instead of the typical agency practice of doling them out one year at a time.
HEP and CAMP were fueling a combined 120 programs annually serving 5,000 students in 20 states as of 2024. But under Trump, that number has dwindled to 45 programs in 12 states, with fewer than 2,000 students served per year.
The HEP-CAMP Association estimates the funding the department is now pulling back could have provided services for 1,650 students.
Federal attacks on the program have puzzled advocates like Dalton, who’s worked for HEP-CAMP grantees since 2001.
“Our programs are designed to get people out into the workforce very quickly, either directly or improve their standing in their workforce,” he said. “For us it’s a pretty obvious win-win for everybody.”
OMB spent months laying the groundwork to pull back funds
The White House Office of Management and Budget, which typically doles out congressional appropriations to federal agencies on a predictable schedule, has foreshadowed disruptions of this kind since this past spring, when it failed to promptly unlock, or “apportion,” Department of Education funding for nearly three dozen programs the Trump administration has previously proposed to eliminate.
OMB did eventually apportion most of the fiscal 2026 funds for education programs, including for the K-12 competitive grants that saw funding holdups this spring.
But those apportionments came significantly later in the fiscal year than during previous administrations. (Another $465 million Congress appropriated for the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research arm, remains unapportioned as the halfway point in the two-year life cycle of the funds approaches.)
Apportionments for roughly half the HEP-CAMP funding and the bulk of the IFLE funding never arrived in Education Department accounts.
“This move shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law,” Collins wrote in her statement on the pocket rescissions.
An even larger package of pocket rescissions for foreign aid programs the Trump administration advanced in August 2025 left education programs untouched. Congress voted before the Sept. 30 deadline to approve those rescissions, and the U.S. Supreme Court at the time allowed Trump to proceed with that plan.
The court hasn’t yet weighed in on the legal merits of the current administration’s approach. And Congress likely won’t vote on this year’s pocket rescissions before the funding expires later this week.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog funded by Congress, has twice deemed pocket rescissions illegal, most recently in 2025.
But the path to accountability may be steep: Only the GAO’s comptroller general can sue the White House over alleged violations of federal spending law, and that role is currently occupied by an interim successor to Gene Dodaro, whose 15-year term expired in December. The president and Congress have yet to agree on a permanent replacement.
2026-09-28 21:03:09
Source link