Beginning most overtly in 2025, with the Trump administration’s punitive freezing of Harvard University’s federal grants, the American education system has been a continuous target of federal downsizing. The weaponization of federal grant freezes and rollback of allocated Congressional funds has affected higher education and K-12 programs in various capacities.

Most recently, the White House has announced its intention of overriding $810 million in congressional appropriations via “pocket rescissions”, in a brief bewilderingly entitled  “President Trump Takes Historic Action to Eliminate Wasteful and Harmful Spending”.  The specificities of his lack of forbearance are named in the brief; “utilizing long-neglected Presidential authorities… by utilizing a pocket rescission for $1 billion of the most harmful government spending”. This is an Executive power that has not been used for more than 50 years – and certainly not days before the end of the 2026 federal fiscal year, on September 30th. Congress’ most recent attempts to halt the pocket rescissions  have been accepted, for the time being; but it sends a foreboding message for Executive action that could be taken in the upcoming fiscal year.

Is this a quintessential display of conservative financial hardball- or a strategic means of undermining institutions that Trump perceives as threatening to his administration’s ideology? I argue that this recent aggressive cancellation of funds is indicative of an ongoing trend of “stealth authoritarianism”; as Executive power is exercised by ostensibly legal and Democratic means, but with an underlying objective of weakening institutions with the potential to threaten the administration’s legitimacy- especially by subverting Congressional power.

The September 25th White House brief takes a populist approach of appealing to “the people”;  citing the rationale for the pocket rescissions as saving taxpayer dollars from frivolous government spending. The areas of funding cuts are primarily that of welfare, environmental regulation, and several line items of the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly $100 million in funding was set for the chopping block,  between International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) and two other programs intended to assist migrant students.  Opposition to this announcement surpassed partisan divides, with Republican and Democratic senators alike immediately pushing back. Republican Senator Susan Collins  of Maine identified the move outright as “illegal” and “undermining Congress’ power of the purse”.

Stealth authoritarianism is characterized primarily by two behaviors, one of which is “reliance on the exercise of ostensibly legal mechanisms that exist in democratic regimes” ( Varol 2015 ).  This attempted circumvention of Congressional power, while legal under certain circumstances, tests the limits of democratic checks and balances. The Trump administration is effectively declaring that it has the ability to slash budget decisions made by Congress- many of which received approval months earlier. Attempting to use this mechanism in such close proximity to the end of the fiscal year is furthermore potentially incriminating; deliberately minimizing the window for lawmaker intervention.

Additionally, instances of stealth authoritarianism entail “undermining partisan alternation by significantly increasing the costs of unseating the incumbent” (Varol 2015). The White House, in this brief, takes a hardline stance on perceived “ harmful government spending” (White House 2026 ); implying that past executives and current Congressional leaders are comparatively unconcerned with how tax dollars are being allocated. He is propagating the narrative that unseating him will, in fact, be more expensive for the American people; and that he alone is interested in protecting their hard-earned dollar. 

Understanding the gravity of this recent executive action includes examining the Trump administration’s history of restrictive and punitive action towards educational institutions, in particular. The aforementioned Harvard grant freezes of 2025 sparked a larger conversation about the consequences private entities may face if they do not comply with the ideologies of the incumbent government. Factoring in the 30 plus lawsuits that have taken place since the beginning of Trump’s second term “over efforts to freeze, disrupt, or cancel education funding” (Stone, Schultz 2025). The implications of targeting education in particular is especially relevant to the idea of gradual democratic erosion. Cutting off resources to institutions of knowledge-building and social capital is a surefire method of establishing complacency and preventing diffusion of knowledge that could question the administration’s legitimacy.