White House considers plan B as DOGE cuts hit a wall on the Hill

Running out of options to get its DOGE cuts approved by Congress, the White House is now looking at a two-year runway to get the cuts passed and opening the door to launching a court fight over the president’s power to shut down spending on his own.

President Donald Trumpinitially wanted Congress to approve a formal rescissions package that would claw back about $9 billion in previously approved federal spending, a vote that would give legislative teeth to some of the cuts DOGE has already made. The package would include major cuts to USAID and public broadcasting like NPR and PBS.

That effort is hitting a dead end on Capitol Hill, with Republicans warning the White House that it is already facing tough odds in advancing their so-called megabill, even though it requires just a simple majority of Republican votes in the Senate.

While the rescissions package would move on a separate track, the White House is recognizing that Congress is preoccupied. Therefore, it's giving itself a much longer timeline to codify DOGE cuts while leaving open the option of challenging the Impoundment Control Act, the 1974 law that limits a president’s ability to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. Trump’s allies have argued the president already has authority to withhold spending but it would likely be up to the courts to decide, given that the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse.

“The focus right now is the reconciliation bill,” said a White House official granted anonymity to speak freely. “I think there's an appetite within Capitol Hill, within the two years that we have to codify the work of DOGE. The procedures of Capitol Hill may not allow for it to happen now but it doesn’t mean it won’t happen later.”

Several GOP senators expressed deep reservations about codifying DOGE cuts as the White House wants.

“I think they don’t want to lose the vote, so I think they may be concerned about the sensibility,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who supports the rescissions effort, told West Wing Playbook.

Other Republicans were more blunt. “I don’t know that we should be taking our limited legislative time to look at that,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). “I don’t think legislation is called for.”

In 2018, during Trump’s first term, the Senate narrowly rejected a $15 billion rescissions package. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was one of two Republicans to vote no. “I don’t like tipping the power of the purse to the executive branch,” she said then.

Now, Collins — who has more power as chair of the Appropriations Committee — is warning she won’t support any effort that cuts global women’s health programs or PEPFAR. “I don’t see those passing,” she told the Washington Post.

The congressional cold shoulder has major implications for the future of DOGE.

Although the group has claimed more than $160 billion in savings — their accounting has been disputed — most of those cuts are unilateral, and potentially reversible executive actions. With both Congress and the courts unwilling to provide legal backing, the administration is running out of ways to ensure its reductions hold, raising the risk that DOGE’s sweeping disruption may leave little lasting impact.

“The cuts won’t be real or lasting unless Congress votes on it,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said. Paul and other fiscal hawks have urged the White House to go bigger, not smaller.

The rescission package’s “$9 billion is a pittance,” he said. “It’s a rounding error and it should only be the beginning. If they’re not going to send us the $9 billion, it sends a really bad signal to anybody that is fiscally responsible that there’s going to be no change from doing things the way that they’ve always been done.”

Complicating matters further, Republicans earlier this year were hoping to use DOGE savings to partially offset the cost of extending the Trump tax cuts. But the rules governing the process the GOP is using to enact the megabill doesn’t allow for cuts to discretionary spending — where most of the DOGE cuts were made.

With few viable paths in Congress, the White House may now pivot to the courts.

“I think they probably want to challenge the Impoundment Act is my sense,” Hawley said. A legal fight over that statute, if successful, could open the door for a broader showdown over Trump’s executive power.

The White House has already expressed an openness to unilaterally freezing money approved by Congress.

“Obviously, we have never taken impoundment off the table, because the president and myself believe that 200 years of the president and executive branch had that ability,” an OMB official said on a call with reporters two weeks ago.

Asked today if Trump would use impoundment authority to withhold funding, the White House official said, “All options are on the table.”

“We’ve been able to achieve what we’ve been able to achieve without going down that path but that’s not to say we wouldn’t consider using it if the situation called for it,” the person said.

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