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The White House has informed Congress it intends to cancel $4.9 billion that lawmakers approved for foreign aid programs, invoking a little-known and legally untested power to slash spending without their approval.

The 15-page notification, sent to Congress on Thursday night and reviewed by The New York Times, is the administration’s first attempt to push through what is known as a “pocket rescission.” It is an effort to unilaterally claw back money that has already been appropriated by waiting so late in the fiscal year to make the request that lawmakers do not have time to reject it before the funding expires.

The fiscal year ends Sept. 30, before the 45-day period in which Congress is required to consider a rescission request from the White House. Republicans could bring the matter to a vote sooner, but party leaders have shown little appetite for resisting the president’s spending demands and asserting their own prerogatives.

The move, the latest chapter in an intensive fight between President Donald Trump and Congress over spending powers, drew swift condemnation from the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, who called it illegal.

“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Friday.

“Given that this package was sent to Congress very close to the end of the fiscal year when the funds are scheduled to expire, this is an apparent attempt to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval,” Collins said.

The maneuver could further complicate lawmakers’ attempts to cobble together a bipartisan funding package to ensure the government does not shut down Oct. 1. Any spending compromise must win Democratic support in the Senate to pass, and Democrats have said they would be loath to lend their votes to such a package if the White House continued unilaterally cutting congressionally approved funding.

The request largely targets accounts funding the U.S.’ contributions to the United Nations and economic development and aid programs run by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has already largely been dismantled by the Trump administration.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the proposal Friday, saying that none of the targeted programs “are in America’s interest, which is why the president is taking decisive action to put America and Americans first.”

The single biggest clawback would be a $445 million cut to U.S. funding of peacekeeping operations abroad, including through the U.N. The request also proposes a $132 million rescission of the $340 million approved by Congress for the Democracy Fund at the State Department. The White House’s proposed budget released earlier this year suggested eliminating that program entirely.

Like the rescissions package sent to Congress that Republicans approved earlier this year, the White House did not single out specific programs for cuts.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan oversight body that reports to Capitol Hill, ruled during the first Trump administration that pocket rescissions are illegal. But Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has made the case that the executive branch has broad discretion to use them.

An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson on Friday called pocket rescissions a “lawful tool available to the executive branch to reduce unnecessary spending” and noted that Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter had proposed similar clawbacks.

Ford proposed multiple rescissions to Congress in 1975 in the final days of that fiscal year. About $10 million that Ford targeted for rescission — but that Congress had not voted on — essentially expired anyway. The Government Accountability Office said at the time that the incident exposed a “major deficiency” in the anti-impoundment rules lawmakers had established, and recommended changes that Congress never adopted.

Courts have not weighed in explicitly on whether pocket rescissions are valid, and Vought at times has openly courted a legal showdown over the issue. Last year, he wrote that the Supreme Court “has not yet had occasion to squarely confront” the substantive issues of the executive branch’s impoundment authority.

The administration’s proposal Friday also infuriated Democrats. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking member on the appropriations panel, said that lawmakers could not “accept this absurd, illegal ploy to steal their constitutional power to determine how taxpayer dollars get spent.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, her Democratic counterpart on the House panel, said she would “refuse to label Vought’s gambit a ‘pocket rescission,’ because it gives his unlawful attempt to steal the promises Congress enacted an air of legitimacy it does not deserve.”

And Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, suggested that the request was “further proof President Trump and congressional Republicans are hellbent on rejecting bipartisanship and ‘going it alone’ this fall.”

“Republicans don’t have to be a rubber stamp for this carnage,” Schumer said. “Democrats stand ready to work with anyone to help American families, lower health care costs and secure our communities. But if Republicans are insistent on going it alone, Democrats won’t be party to their destruction.”

A White House official who briefed reporters Friday on the condition of anonymity insisted repeatedly that the clawback would not upend delicate talks to fund the government next fiscal year.

Instead, the official framed the administration’s gambit as a helpful step, arguing that some Republicans would not have been inclined to support a funding measure — even one that kept spending flat — unless the administration had demonstrated progress on cuts.

This article originally appeared in .

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