At the Center of the Government Shutdown, the Little-Known Office Calling the Shots

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is using the government shutdown as a smoke-screen for the Trump Administration's illegal cuts to government programs and staff.

Most operations of the federal government ceased Wednesday when Congress failed to pass funding for agencies for fiscal year 2026. Without an enacted appropriations law, agencies have no constitutional authority to spend money.

In the background of congressional negotiations over the FY2026 appropriations looms the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Charged with producing the President’s annual budget proposal and overseeing management of executive branch agencies, OMB also oversees federal funds in a process called apportionment. Apportionment unlocks funds over the course of the fiscal year to agencies that then allocate money to their programs, projects, and activities.

While OMB typically releases appropriated funds over the course of the fiscal year, because that’s what the law requires, Trump’s OMB has taken a different approach.

Although the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, not every penny it appropriates needs to be spent by the federal government. Agencies may find in the course of managing programs or projects that not all funds can or should be spent by the end of the fiscal year. As we explained last spring, the Impoundment Control Act establishes a process for rescinding unnecessary funds, which the President must formally request of Congress. Both chambers then have 45 days to approve the rescission request. President Trump proposed rescissions totalling $14.8 billion in his first term, second only to a $15.4 billion request in 1981 as the largest since 1974.

In this second term, however, the Trump Administration has gone much farther than congressionally-approved rescissions, challenging congressional power of the purse. It has frozen or cancelled what Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee estimate to be $410 billion in federal funding at the direction of OMB Director Russell Vought. OMB has made a full accounting of cuts difficult. A federal appeals court ordered OMB to restore its public spending database after it was taken off line. Nevertheless, billions of dollars in federal spending remains untraceable through limited and flawed reporting on more than 100 programs. OMB also has disrupted authorized spending through agency reorganizations and layoffs.

Vought further irked Senate appropriators in both parties in August by seeking additional rescissions without allowing Congress the full 45-day window to consider. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins declared them to be an “attempt to undermine the law.” Nevertheless, the Supreme Court allowed the rescission of $4 billion in foreign aid four days before the end of the fiscal year.

OMB’s conduct has rattled the trust of lawmakers that agreements they reach on spending will be honored by the White House. Republican Rep. Steve Womack asked, although some Democrats’ “predisposition might be to help negotiate with Republicans on a funding mechanism, why would you do that if you know that whatever you negotiate is going to be subject to the knife pulled out by Russ Vought?” Democrats on the Appropriations Committees proposed several specific prohibitions on the Administration changing federal spending after it’s enacted. Their proposal also eliminated the “fast-track” provision of the Impoundment Control Act, creating a deadline for requests of 90 days before the expiration of funding for a program. This proposal earned the support of Brendan Buck, a former aide to Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner.

House Republicans, however, have thrown some support to Vought, at a high price for legislative branch independence. They inserted a provision into the as-yet-unpassed legislative branch appropriations bill restricting Congress’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) from suing OMB under the Impoundment Control Act to recover withheld funds unless Congress passes a joint resolution permitting it to do so. Effectively, it politicizes GAO enforcement of the Impoundment Control Act rather than leaving that decision as it is now in the hands of Congress’s nonpartisan institutional staff. It also would slash GAO funding in half.

As Congress tries to reach an agreement on re-opening the government, OMB has taken advantage of the situation to continue its freezes and cuts. On October 1, Vought announced the cancellation of $8 billion in grants to renewable energy projects in several states with Democratic governments (subsequent analysis revealed more than $1 billion of these grants would affect projects in states Trump won in 2024). Vought also threatened and later began mass layoffs of furloughed government workers, which OMB has no legal authority to do. And on October 3 OMB threatened to not pay furloughed government workers backpay, which is guaranteed by a law Trump himself approved after a shutdown in his first term. (Given that the Trump Administration already had planned to relieve 12% of the federal workforce of their positions, and OMB requested agencies’ plans for another round of layoffs by September 30, these threats have rung hollow with congressional Democrats. Major public sector unions are suing to block any layoffs as well.)

At this point, the shutdown is part of a broader struggle between Vought and the White House and Congress over who has ultimate control of the people’s money: its elected representatives, as written in the Constitution, or the chief executive. Attempts by English King Charles II to control both the purse and the sword led Parliament to reassert itself and depose him through the “Glorious Revolution” in 1688. Control of spending by the government’s representative body, therefore, was top of mind for the Constitution’s framers. Vought’s actions, therefore, don’t just undermine constitutional and legal norms, but centuries of understanding about the separation of powers.