Trump cancels $1.5 mln in aid to promote paintings by Ukrainian women
US President Donald Trump is going to cancel almost $5 billion in Congress-approved spending on foreign aid and peacekeeping, in particular, $1.5 million to promote paintings by Ukrainian women, The New York Post wrote on Friday.
President Trump is moving to do it in a rare “pocket rescission,” The Post has learned — making use of a legally debated maneuver that hasn’t been done in 48 years.
The spending had been destined for a wide variety of nonprofits and foreign governments and was paused earlier this year by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and then stuck in legal limbo due to an ensuing lawsuit filed by the Global Health Council.
"The Trump administration has highlighted spending items that are allegedly wasteful, such as $24.6 million for ‘climate resilience’ in Honduras, $2.7 million for the South African Democracy Works Foundation, which published inflammatory racial articles including ‘The Problem with White People,’ and $3.9 million to promote democracy among LGBT people in the Western Balkans. Other highlighted allocations include $1.5 million to market the paintings of Ukrainian women," the report notes.
The roughly $838 million in peacekeeping funds being eliminated include payments to support United Nations peacekeeping forces in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Trump administration recently brokered a peace deal with next-door Rwanda, and the Central African Republic, where the mission has been criticized as aligned with Russian business interests.
Allocated peacekeeping funds include $11 million to provide Uruguay’s international peacekeeping forces with armored personnel carriers, $4 million for a training center in Zambia and $3 million for barracks to house Kazakhstani peacekeepers.
The legality of “pocket rescissions” is a matter of intense debate, but there’s little court precedent. The legislative Government Accountability Office deems the practice illegal; Trump’s OMB team says otherwise.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 limits the president’s ability to balk at spending appropriated funds and lays out the process for legislative rescissions — such as the package Trump signed last month yanking $1 billion in federal funding for NPR and PBS and $8 billion from USAID.
