The Trump White House has moved to permanently cancel $810 million in federal spending that Congress already approved, using a rare and legally contested budget maneuver just days before the money would otherwise go out the door.

The Office of Management and Budget, run by Director Russell Vought, submitted the rescission request Friday, targeting money for refugee resettlement, immigrant services and diversity-focused grants. According to CBS News, the biggest single chunk — $567 million — would strip Department of Health and Human Services funding for nonprofits that support refugees, asylees and other non-citizens. Another $70 million earmarked for international education grants and fellowships, and $56 million in Housing and Urban Development programs, are also on the chopping block.

The tool is known as a "pocket rescission" — a maneuver that lets the White House ask Congress to claw back money so close to the end of the fiscal year that the funds simply expire before lawmakers can act on the request one way or another. The fiscal year ends September 29.

A GOP chair breaks ranks

Unlike most Trump-era funding fights, this one has drawn fire from inside the president's own party. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, said the administration "intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation," calling it part of a broader pattern of OMB trying "to undermine Congress's Constitutional power of the purse," according to the Washington Post.

"Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law," Collins said.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, was blunter, accusing the administration of "trying to steal more money promised to communities."

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has already concluded that pocket rescissions violate the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which gives Congress 45 legislative days to weigh in on any rescission request — a window OMB is again running out the clock on. The White House disagrees, arguing the law doesn't explicitly bar the timing trick, according to NBC News.

This is not the administration's first run at the tactic. Trump used the same playbook a year ago to cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid — the first time in roughly 50 years a president had attempted it. The Supreme Court let that cancellation stand, but on narrow grounds tied to the executive's foreign-affairs authority, without settling whether pocket rescissions themselves are constitutional, as Time reported.

That leaves this fresh $810 million cut on shaky and untested legal footing heading into a domestic-spending fight rather than a foreign-aid one — precisely the kind of case appropriators like Collins say will finally force a court to rule squarely on whether the maneuver is legal at all.

Legal challenges are expected to follow quickly, mirroring the lawsuits that trailed last year's foreign aid rescission. With the fiscal year closing Tuesday, opponents in Congress have essentially no procedural path left to stop the money from disappearing before a judge can weigh in.