Lawfare Daily: Pocket Rescissions in Congress
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
On today’s episode, Molly Reynolds, Contributing Editor at Lawfare and Senior Fellow at Brookings, sits down with Zach Price, Associate Professor of Law at UC Law San Francisco, and Phil Wallach, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, to discuss pocket rescissions as an approach to cancelling funds previously approved by Congress. They cover whether the practice is legal, how it threatens Congress’s institutional power, and how they fit in with broader efforts by the Trump administration.
For more, take a look at the following pieces on Lawfare:
- “Past Pocket Rescissions Are Not Precedents for Power Vought Claims,” by Cerin Lindgrensavage and William Ford
- “Lawfare Daily: The President, Congress, and the Power of the Purse,” with Molly Reynolds, Matt Lawrence, Eloise Pasachoff, and Zachary Price
- “Pocket Rescissions: Legal Controversy and Political Meaning,” by Philip Wallach
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Transcript
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| 1:06.1 | If you read the statute to create a just totally open-ended power to cancel whatever money they can keep in play at the end of the fiscal year, there's no standard in the statute that would guide how you exercise that power. |
| 1:20.9 | So it would be a sort of limitless delegation with respect to canceling money. |
| 1:26.1 | It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 1:28.2 | I'm Molly Reynolds, contributing editor at Lawfare and senior fellow at Brookings, |
| 1:32.5 | with Zach Price, Associate Professor of Law at UC Law, San Francisco, |
| 1:36.9 | and Phil Wallach, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 1:40.8 | Really, for Congress to be a co-equal or senior policymaker, we can't have a system in which the |
| 1:48.8 | executive just gets to cancel what they do. And that's pocket recisions is a way of doing that. |
| 1:55.0 | Today, we're talking about pocket recisions, their legality and what they could mean for Congress's |
| 1:59.8 | power. So let's start off by |
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