GAO Responsibilities Under Impoundment Control Act of 1974

GAO was asked about various procedural and legal issues concerning its implementation of the Impoundment Control Act. The Act requires the President to submit a special message to Congress on any impoundments he wishes to initiate. A copy of the message should be transmitted to GAO for review on the same day it is sent to Congress. Each proposed impoundment is assigned to the GAO division with audit responsibility for the programs involved for verification of the information in the message. The Office of the General Counsel examines the legal implications of each impoundment to determine if the proposal is in compliance with statutory authority. When GAO believes that information is inaccurate, incomplete, or without legal justification, the Office of Management and Budget and the agency involved is contacted. If the issue is not resolved, information on the differences are reported to Congress. On each impoundment, an impoundment report is transmitted to Congress by GAO. President Carter proposed 33 rescissions in his third special message to Congress. President Reagan reclassified these rescission proposals as deferrals. He withdrew the rescission proposals upon which Congress had not acted and notified Congress that the same funds were now being deferred. In his eighth special message, he reproposed the 33 rescissions. In 27 of these proposals, funds were added or deleted from those proposed by President Carter. The reclassification of rescissions to deferrals was presented as a temporary measure to allow the new President to review the proposals of the previous President in the context of his economic plan. GAO did not find these actions improper. The conversion to deferrals should act merely to toll the running of the 45-day period. When the rescissions are resubmitted, the appropriate witholding period should be only that time which has not yet run on the original proposals.