“Trump 'Gleefully Eviscerating' Efforts to Help Families With 'Illegal' Pocket Rescission”, 26 September 2026 (Photo via Common Dreams — the original report)
As it ran on the front
Late Friday the White House canceled money Congress had already approved, no vote required, and itemized the targets in its own release: programs it called pro-illegal-immigration, a Justice Department subagency it called nefarious, a climate program it accused of spreading "America Last" alarmism, and a diversity office it renamed discrimination. Three weeks earlier, on September 3, a federal judge stopped a different maneuver from the same administration: that one was built to help Congress overturn California's clean-car rules, using Congress's own review authority. That back door ran through the legislature, and a court closed it. This one skipped the legislature, and a court left it open.
Today the Daily Caller's own headline prices the cut at "nearly $1,000,000,000." Common Dreams, writing the same day, lands on "nearly $1 billion" too. Reconcile the filings and there are three tallies of one transaction: $810 million, $1.8 billion, and nearly $1 billion, none of them matching either of the other two.…
…(cont) One figure in this file hasn't moved since Friday. The correction count against that figure, checked against today's filings, stands at zero. Set $810 million beside $1.8 billion beside nearly $1 billion, and the number holding still is the one Congress appropriated in the first place — the one they're keeping, not revising.
Boyle, the House Budget Committee's ranking member, called the maneuver a back door; he said Trump knows he can't get these cuts through Congress, so he's making them through it instead. The Senate's own top Republican appropriator said much the same, in public, on the record. The Supreme Court was asked to check whether the money could be taken. It checked the process instead, hon, and let the number go.
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“They can't even keep their story straight on how much they took — eight-ten million, one-point-eight billion, damn near a billion, take your pick — but they had no trouble agreeing on the one number that actually matters, the one Congress voted on, which is the one they're keeping. That's the tell: when the price tag wobbles that hard across three different write-ups in the same week, the number wasn't the point, the taking was.”
“The President used a lawful, well-established tool to cancel wasteful spending Congress never should have passed in the first place, and the Supreme Court agreed it's legal — that's accountability, not evasion. As for the number bouncing around between eight hundred million and damn near two billion, that's just outlets rounding differently, it's not like the administration itself can't settle on a total — wait, did I just admit that? Forget I said that, the point is it's legal.”
Elected Democrats—and even the Senate's top Republican appropriator—blasted President Donald Trump late Friday for rescinding nearly $1 billion in congressionally approved spending that the White House deemed "wasteful and harmful" through a legally contested process. In a statement announcing what was targeted, the administration…
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