Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, and her Democratic counterpart are challenging the Trump administration’s handling of emergency funding included in legislation passed earlier this month.
In the letter addressed to President Trump’s budget chief Russell Vought, Collins and Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the funding committee, take issue with efforts by the administration to withhold some emergency-designated funding authorized by Congress.
The negotiators cite a recent message from the administration saying it would only concur with some of Congress’s emergency designations for funding — but not all.
Collins and Murray said in the letter that the president “does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate.” They also point to a provision in the recent funding bill they say “expressly incorporates” language that “has been used in appropriations legislation for decades, and it has always been interpreted to give the President a binary choice: He must concur with all or none of Congress’s emergency designations.”
“Just as the President does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate. This interpretation is consistent with congressional intent and is the most logical and consistent reading of the law,” they wrote.
The Hill has reached out to the White House budget office for comment.
The administration said it will only “designate as emergency requirements 16 appropriations” in accordance with the recently passed government funding bill and the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, but that the designation does not “include the remaining 11 appropriations – totaling nearly $3 billion.”
The administration said the funding was “improperly designated by the Congress as emergency in the Act that stem from the June 2023 side deal with the Democrats to evade the spending caps signed into law” and does “not concur that the added spending is truly for emergency needs.”
The administration is referring to a bipartisan deal then-President Biden struck with House GOP leadership in 2023 to suspend the debt ceiling. The deal included a legislative piece, known as the Fiscal Responsibility Act, that put limits on defense and nondefense spending.
But a key component of the deal that Republicans have long targeted is a bipartisan handshake agreement not reflected in the law that allowed for further spending and offsets that Democrats say was key to securing their support for the overall deal in order to protect domestic programs.
Some Republicans have cheered the recent move by Trump, however.
“Congress often uses ‘emergency’ designations to shell out more money than needed, hiding the reality of increased spending from the American people,” House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said in a statement this week. “I applaud President Trump for bucking the swampy status quo and cutting billions of dollars in wasteful and unnecessary spending on behalf of the American taxpayer.”
But in the recent letter from Collins and Murray, the two say, “Regardless of our views on the Fiscal Responsibility Act and accompanying implementation agreement, it is incumbent on all of us to follow the law as written—not as we would like it to be.”
They also say the administration failed to request changes to some of the designations stemming from the previous bipartisan deal.
“In this case, if the Administration disagreed with some of the designations that stem from the ‘side deal,’ it could have requested an anomaly prior to enactment of the continuing resolution, as it did in connection with numerous other issues,” they wrote. “Further, this new piecemeal approach calls into the question the availability of the emergency funding in the continuing resolution that the President has concurred with, including $8 billion in housing assistance.”
They additionally expressed concern that what they described as “sudden changes” to the budget office’s “interpretation of long-standing statutory provisions could be disruptive to the appropriations process and make it more difficult for the Appropriations Committee to work in a collaborative fashion with the Administration to advance priorities on behalf of the American people.”
“Collaboration will become even more challenging when the Committee is first informed of such developments through the press, rather than notified through official channels, as was the case here,” they added.
It’s the latest instance of lawmakers on both sides being caught off guard by actions by the Trump administration’s targeting certain funding authorized by Congress. It also comes as previous administration efforts to freeze funding approved by Congress have been tangled up in the courts in recent months.
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