Russ Vought’s relationship with Republican appropriators was already strained. Then he started talking about pursuing the ultimate end-run around their funding power heading into the fall.

The White House budget director has been persistently touting the virtues of “pocket rescissions,” a tactic he has floated as a way to codify the spending cuts Elon Musk made while atop his Department of Government Efficiency initiative, and which the federal government’s top watchdog says is illegal.

On Capitol Hill, leading GOP appropriators see Vought’s comments as another shot against them in an escalating battle with the Trump administration over Congress’ “power of the purse.” And they warn that the budget director’s adversarial posture hinders their relationship with the White House as they work to head off a government shutdown in just over three months.

“Pocket rescissions are illegal, in my judgment,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in a brief interview this week, “and contradict the will of Congress and the constitutional authority of Congress to appropriate funds.”

To hear Vought tell it, a “pocket rescission” is a legitimate tool at the executive branch’s disposal. In such a scenario, President Donald Trump would issue a formal request to claw back funding, similar to the $9.4 billion package he sent lawmakers this month to cancel congressionally approved funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid.

But in this case, the memo would land on Capitol Hill less than 45 days before the new fiscal year is set to begin Oct. 1. By withholding the cash for that full timeframe — regardless of action by Congress — the White House would treat the funding as expired when the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

The dizzying ploy is another means toward the same goal Trump has been chasing since Inauguration Day: to spend less money than Congress has explicitly mandated in law. But the Government Accountability Office says the maneuver is unlawful, and the GOP lawmakers in charge of divvying up federal funding are wary that Vought is now talking about it in the open.

“I understand we want to use all the arrows in our quiver, and he wants to use all his,” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said of Vought in an interview. “But every time you pull out an arrow, you have to be ready for the consequences, right?”

Joyce continued: “It’s going to change the course of conversations and how each side works toward coming to resolution going forward.”

Vought declined last week to elaborate on his intentions, when pressed in person on Capitol Hill about his plans to use the ploy in the coming months. His office also did not return a request for comment. However, the budget director laid out a detailed argument for the maneuver on television earlier in the month — then mentioned it again as he left a meeting with Speaker Mike Johnson and then during a later hearing with House appropriators.

“The very Impoundment Control Act itself allows for a procedure called pocket rescissions, later in the year, to be able to bank some of these savings, without the bill actually being passed,” Vought said on CNN. “It’s a provision that has been rarely used. But it is there. And we intend to use all of these tools.”

Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, who chairs the appropriations panel that funds the Interior Department and the EPA, recently warned that the gambit is “a bad idea” that “undermines Congress’ authority,” after saying last month that he thinks “it’s illegal” for a president to withhold funding lawmakers approved.

But many top Republican appropriators — while scoffing at Vought’s comments — aren’t willing to engage in rhetorical arguments about the bounds of the president’s spending power.

“Talking is one thing. We’ll see if he actually does it,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who chairs the appropriations panel that funds the military, said about Vought’s comments.

“He’s got his ideas,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), chair of the appropriations panel responsible for funding the departments of Transportation and Housing.

“I’d have some concerns about it,” said Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), who chairs the appropriations panel that funds the departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services — all targets of Trump’s deepest funding cuts.

Tension has been building for months between those Republican appropriators and Vought, who has a history of testing the limits of funding law: When he served in this same role during Trump’s first administration, he froze aid to Ukraine in a move that helped set the stage for the president’s first impeachment trial.

Republican funding leaders are irked that the White House has yet to deliver a full budget request, which appropriators rely upon to write their dozen funding measures. Vought has already left open the door to withholding the new money if the administration doesn’t agree with the spending priorities in the final bills.

They also say the president’s budget director and other Cabinet secretaries have withheld essential information about how they are using federal cash as the Trump administration fights off more than 100 legal challenges around the country. The suits are seeking to overturn the White House’s freezing of billions of dollars Congress already approved for myriad programs and agencies.

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) issued a rare rebuke of Vought this spring for taking down the public website showing how agencies are expected to disburse federal dollars.

But the Oklahoma Republican generally avoids any public criticism of the Trump administration and is not sounding off now about Vought’s embrace of pocket rescissions. Cole said this month that he would “look at each individual” request the White House sends to claw back funding, now that the House has passed the $9.4 billion package to nix money for foreign aid and public broadcasting.

That package of funding cuts now sits in the Senate, where some top Republicans are interested in tweaking the plan to protect funding for preventing AIDS around the world and supporting PBS programming in their home states. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) suggested Vought’s public comments about using pocket rescissions could be intended to encourage reluctant senators to clear it.

“Maybe that’s the way to let members know: Vote for the ones he sends up,” Johnson said, noting that he would be “totally supportive” of Vought using the tactic this fall.

Another Senate fiscal hawk, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said he believes the law “does allow for pocket rescissions.”

“I think the president should have more power not to spend money,” Paul told reporters last week. “So if we have a way to reduce spending, by all means, we should use it.”

No court has ruled on the president’s power to cancel funding by sending Congress a request and then running out the clock at the end of the fiscal year. But GAO has twice weighed in.

In 2018, the watchdog found that the law “does not permit the withholding of funds through their date of expiration.” Vought, though, likes to cite an older GAO conclusion from 1975: It determined that Congress was unable to reject then-President Gerald Ford’s requests to claw back funding “in time to prevent the budget authority from lapsing.”

Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.

As chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Rand Paul technically has jurisdiction over a central plank of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” But the Kentucky Republican’s desire to aggressively cut the administration’s request for border security spending has sidelined him in negotiations.

In an interview this week, Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham said that he has taken over as the lead negotiator in talks with bicameral leadership and the White House over how to deploy tens of billions of dollars to strengthen border security and reduce the flow of migrant encounters at the southern border into the United States.

Graham, a South Carolina Republican who released his own border security funding plan shortly after Paul introduced his, said he offered himself up to the Trump administration as the point person on the border security provisions of the megabill.

“Senator Paul usually votes ‘no’ and blames everybody else for not being pure enough,” said Graham, who has a long history of clashing with Paul over federal spending and foreign policy. “As chairman, you … don’t have that luxury sometimes. You have to do things as chairman you wouldn’t have to do as a rank-and-file member.”

“Senator Paul’s reducing the amount [for border security] didn’t withstand scrutiny,” Graham added. “The analysis was shallow.”

At the same time, the office of Senate GOP Conference Vice-Chair James Lankford of Oklahoma — also the chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Management, Federal Workforce and Regulatory Affairs — is planning to work directly with Senate leadership staff on the government affairs provisions, said a Senate Republican aide granted anonymity to describe internal party dynamics.

Paul has made clear repeatedly he isn’t planning to vote for the party-line tax and spending bill anyway, giving leadership few reasons to try and play nice. Yet the decision by senior Senate Republicans to undermine a committee chair in such a way marks a dramatic departure from standard Senate procedure. It also reflects the extent to which Paul has become an ideological island, despite him holding a committee gavel thanks to the chamber’s rules around seniority.

And in another break with precedent, few of Paul’s own members on the Homeland Security panel, if any, appeared supportive of the chair’s approach or willing to back him up against leadership’s attempts to undermine him. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said it was concerning that Paul would draft his own proposal “without any consultation of the committee.”

Hawley added he had “never seen that happen before.”

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who sits on both the Homeland and Budget panels who described Paul as “well-meaning” and “principled,” said if Paul’s goal was to change people’s minds, the Kentuckian would have been better off working with fellow members of his conference.

“If your objective is just to have a point of view, that’s one thing you can do; but if your objective is to rally support, then you have a different path,” Moreno said.

Paul has even lost an ally in Sen. Ron Johnson, another steadfast fiscal hawk who leadership hopes will ultimately support the megabill. Johnson said last week he will support the administration’s border security funding request after hearing directly from Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser and architect of the president’s immigration platform.

Graham said he and Senate Majority Leader John Thune requested that Miller brief Senate Republicans on the administration’s border security needs to “contest the analysis of Senator Paul.” Paul did not attend the briefing, nor has he spoken to Graham about their differences, according to Graham.

In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, had no direct comment on Paul’s exclusion from the process.

“The administration is profoundly grateful for Senator Graham and the Budget Committee’s excellent work on the Homeland Security Text,” said Jackson, adding that it would aid Trump’s actions to crack down on illegal border crossings by “funding at least one million removals, adding new ICE and border personnel, expanding detention capacity, and giving bonuses to hardworking Border Patrol and ICE agents.”

The framework put forward by Graham, which Senate GOP leadership is expected to draw from in the final package they hope to vote on next week, would mirror the House-passed funding levels by allocating about $46.5 billion for the border wall and surrounding infrastructure and $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and checkpoints.

In contrast, Paul’s proposal would allocate just $6.5 billion in border wall and related infrastructure funding, with only $2.5 billion for CBP facilities and checkpoints.

When asked about concerns he was operating without consulting his fellow Republicans on the panel, Paul emphasized that no committee is holding a markup on their contributions for the megabill.

“There were no committee votes on what the product would be,” Paul said. “All of the drafts were done by the chairman of each committee.”

Paul also said he thought some of the provisions of his proposal unrelated to border security would end up in the final bill, and that he was involved in talks with the parliamentarian about what provisions would be germane under the strict rules governing the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process Republicans want to use to pass the megabill.

A Paul spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about whether he still expected to have a say in negotiations with the parliamentarian.

Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

Rep. Robert Garcia wants to usher in a new era for Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. But don’t ask the 47-year-old Californian if he’s seeking “generational change.”

Garcia has instead fashioned his candidacy for his party’s top leadership post on the panel around his experience as a big-city mayor and contributions on the Oversight panel, sidestepping the age and seniority questions that have roiled the Democratic Party.

That careful approach — calibrated to appeal widely inside a House Democratic Caucus whose members are both eager to promote fresh faces and wary of sticking fingers in the eyes of party elders — has allowed Garcia, only in his second term, to emerge as the prohibitive favorite in the closely watched internal contest to replace the late Rep. Gerry Connolly.

Garcia has emerged as a middle-ground choice ahead of next week’s caucus election for Oversight ranking member that is putting two older lawmakers — Reps. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, 70, and Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, 76 — against two younger Democrats: Garcia and 44-year-old Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas.

His careful pitch was on display in a recent interview, when he sought to thread a needle between a Democratic base demanding an aggressive confrontation with President Donald Trump and the more delicate sensibilities of fellow House Democrats, whose votes he is courting.

“The seniority system in Congress is not going to go away,” Garcia said, playing down the notion that the race is a proxy battle in a larger war over the future of the Democratic Party. “There’s an opportunity here to expand who’s at that table, and I bring a different kind of experience. I may not have the most time served in Congress, but I certainly would put my experience up against anybody’s.”

His approach was no doubt informed by the last election for Democratic leadership of the Oversight panel, where Connolly was elected at age 74 last year over 35-year-old progressive stalwart Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Connolly’s sudden illness and death from esophageal cancer in May only served to rekindle the quiet but urgent conversation about whether Democrats need to promote younger leaders.

Crockett has been more outspoken in presenting herself as the face of that younger, more confrontational generation. She’s built a reputation as a partisan brawler in viral committee-room exchanges and cable-TV appearances. She has raised eyebrows inside the caucus, for instance, by openly discussing pursuing a Trump impeachment should Democrats retake the majority next year.

“For me, it starts with: How do we motivate the base? I think that I am the singular candidate that can really motivate and excite the base,” she told reporters last week leaving a closed-door candidate meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.

Committee leadership contests, however, tend to center on inside-the-building glad-handing than appeals to voters at large, and that is the campaign Garcia has undertaken. After backing Ocasio-Cortez for the Oversight job last Congress, Garcia has taken pains to avoid the pitfalls she faced. He has personally met with all but a handful of the 214 sitting House Democrats, according to a person granted anonymity to describe his strategy.

In the interview, the former mayor of Long Beach cast himself less as an anti-Trump attack dog and more as a consensus-builder. He shied away from talk of impeaching Trump, calling it “premature” without buy-in from other Democrats, and emphasized that the committee would do more than bulldog the Trump administration under a Democratic majority.

That has been welcome to members who have been put off by some of Crockett’s comments, including her willingness to entertain impeachment. “You can’t get out ahead of your skis if you’re weighing something as serious as this, that requires real buy-in from battleground members and safe-seat members,” said one battleground Democrat who was granted anonymity to react candidly.

There are signs the more prudent approach is paying off. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has already endorsed Garcia, the only Latino member running for the job, while other powerful groups including the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Progressive Caucus and New Democrat Coalition appear unlikely to endorse.

He’s also expected to receive strong support from the 43-member delegation of California Democrats — a historically formidable bloc — and he’s earned plaudits from colleagues who appreciate the millions of dollars he’s raised for the party and candidates as they gear up for an expensive fight to retake the House.

“I really value the people who pay their dues early and on time and who give to other people,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a DCCC national finance co-chair who is supporting Garcia.

Garcia isn’t entirely playing the inside game by any means. He has occasionally sought to bait his Republican colleagues on the Oversight panel and at times has tested what kind of rhetoric crosses the line.

At a hearing of an Oversight subcommittee set up to work alongside Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, Garcia announced he would display a “dick pic.” He proceeded to unveil a headshot of Musk, after reminding colleagues how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — the well-known conservative provocateur who chairs the subpanel — had shown nude photos of presidential son Hunter Biden at a previous committee meeting.

Garcia is also among a handful of Democrats — alongside California Gov. Gavin Newsom, New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver and California Sen. Alex Padilla — who have found themselves in federal law enforcement crosshairs under Trump: In February, a prosecutor appointed by Trump threatened to investigate him after he openly suggested that the public wants Democrats to “bring actual weapons to this bar fight” for democracy.

Garcia denied making any actual threat and said he would not be intimidated.

“I’m not afraid of Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, or Donald Trump, or other folks that are trying to cause harm,” he said in the interview — a sentiment that could appeal to Democrats, like Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont, who want younger, more aggressive leaders to step up.

“We as a caucus need to have structures in place to allow young talent to be cultivated whether it is members who have only been here a few years,” said Balint. “This is what our voters want, so let’s do something about it.”

Senate Republicans are fielding mounting warnings from economists that their signature legislation would add trillions of dollars to the deficit. It appears to be the last thing on their minds.

As Senate Majority Leader John Thune prepares to jam through the GOP’s sprawling border, energy and tax package to President Donald Trump’s desk, fellow Republicans are largely ignoring a host of reports warning that their bill would worsen the nation’s fiscal trajectory in a serious way.

They’re instead relying on estimates from the White House that assume vastly greater economic growth than virtually every other economic model — while trashing the credibility of Congress’ nonpartisan budget scorer, the Congressional Budget Office, which said on Tuesday that the House-passed border, energy and tax bill would add around $2.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade.

“It’s a model. And obviously, they’ve been famously wrong before,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) of the latest CBO report. “We do have more debt now than we had before, for sure, but I think they grossly underestimate the economic benefits.”

The problem highlighted by CBO and other economists is this: While the GOP’s tax cuts may provide some economic growth, they will likely not juice the economy as much as when Republicans first enacted Trump’s tax cuts in 2017. On the flip side, with federal debt closing in on $37 trillion, the rising costs of servicing more expensive interest payments will far outweigh any additional revenue that is generated from increased economic growth.

“The economic and fiscal state is not what it was in 2017,” said Paul Winfree, president and CEO of the Economic Policy Innovation Center, who was previously a top economic official in the first Trump administration. Winfree added in a text message that “the stock of debt is so large that anything we do to modestly increase productivity (and growth) without reducing spending … will lead to higher costs.”

That was underscored Tuesday when CBO put a number this week to the warning economists have been making for months: that the GOP package would hike interest rates and in turn increase borrowing costs.

Higher interest rates would boost payments on the national debt by an estimated $440 billion over a decade, CBO predicted, while the megabill would drive yearly economic growth of just 0.5 percent on average during that time. House Republican leaders are claiming the bill would generate $2.5 trillion by banking on total average growth of 2.6 percent.

That finding prompted an unusual phenomenon. Usually tax-cutting bills tend to cost less under so-called “dynamic” scores that include economic effects. Not so here: The $2.8 trillion figure released Tuesday outstripped the CBO’s prior $2.4 trillion estimate that did not include economic analysis — mostly attributable to the fact that, in their words, the bill “would increase interest rates.”

Lack of recognition of the dynamic has upset at least one Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who dropped his own report Wednesday illustrating that the GOP’s megabill has little shot of bending the deficit trajectory downward, even in the rosiest of economic circumstances.

Johnson, who said he will vote against the massive tax and spending package as it’s currently written, is challenging his colleagues in the Senate and in the administration to show him where he’s wrong.

“The whole point of laying out the report was to get everyone to acknowledge and admit reality,” Johnson told reporters. “Nobody’s pushed back on my numbers. Here’s an opportunity to do it. … I’ve shown people my work. Who else has shown people work?”

But Thune took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to argue that the party-line megabill would generate enough revenue — around $4.1 trillion — through economic growth to completely make up for the deficit impact from the reduced revenue, citing a report from the White House’s Council for Economic Advisors that asserts the bill would lead to long-run GDP growth of up to 3.5 percent.

Thune added that CBO “characteristically, I should say, underestimates the economic growth, and hence the revenue, that this bill would provide.”

The White House figures are outliers compared with other economic models. The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation found, for instance, that the GOP’s plan would boost economic growth by 0.8 percent in the long-run but still, on a dynamic basis and after $1.5 trillion in net spending cuts, add $1.7 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that the bill would spur economic growth of 0.4 percent over 10 years and add $3.2 trillion to the deficit over a decade, all things considered.

Kyle Pomerleau of the American Enterprise Institute called the White House estimates “outrageous” and “way higher than everyone else’s.” He said the in-house analysis takes into account tax incentives, like those for domestic manufacturing, that didn’t end up in the bill that passed the House in May.

“They just say that, ‘well, the individual income tax — that’s going to make people work more and that’s it,’” he said. “But it misses so many different details of the actual reform itself.”

Democrats say voters will notice if the GOP package becomes a drag on the economy rather than the boon Republicans are marketing. Reiterating a claim party leaders often voice, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said the 2017 tax bill “ended up being a stone” around Republicans’ neck “that helped lead to their bloodletting” in the 2018 midterms.

“At some point they have to look at all this new information and decide to stop and go back to the drawing board,” Murphy said in a brief interview. “Because what they’re designing is not going to help our economy and is going to hurt a ton of people.”

The release of the CBO report comes as Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) fields requests from several of his GOP colleagues to scale back changes to taxes that fund Medicaid and cuts to green energy credits. Crapo has been also pushing to use an accounting maneuver known as a current policy baseline, which would effectively zero out the cost of around $3.8 trillion in tax cut extensions.

It would allow Senate Republicans to make Trump’s tax cuts permanent without having to offset much of their deficit impact, which would otherwise be required by the Senate’s budget rules.

Asked for his reaction to the new CBO report, Crapo said he has “the same reaction I’ve always had” to the official scorekeeper’s numbers: “They’re not using the right baseline, and they aren’t analyzing it dynamically.”

Jordain Carney, Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.