US Representative Virginia Foxx
Credit: Reuters Photo
Washington: Congress approved a White House request to claw back $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting, after Republicans bowed to President Donald Trump in an unusual surrender of congressional spending power.
The House's 216-213 vote early Friday sent the package to Trump for his signature. Two Republicans, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Michael Turner of Ohio, opposed the measure.
The Senate approved the package in a predawn 51-48 vote the day before, overcoming the objections of two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who argued that their party was ceding Congress' constitutional control over federal funding.
The bulk of the funds targeted -- about $8 billion -- was for foreign assistance programs. The remaining $1.1 billion was for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which finances NPR and PBS.
The debate on the measure laid bare a simmering fight over Congress' power of the purse. Since Trump began his second term, the White House has moved aggressively and at times unilaterally, primarily through the Department of Government Efficiency, to expand the executive branch's control over federal spending, a power the Constitution gives to the legislative branch.
Top White House officials, led by Russell Vought, the budget office director, have sought to rein in the size of the federal government, including by freezing funds appropriated by Congress. It is part of a wider campaign to claim far-reaching powers over federal spending for the president.
This time, the administration went through a formal process by submitting what is known as a rescissions bill. Those measures are rare and seldom succeed, given how tightly Congress has historically guarded its power over federal spending. The last such package to be enacted was in 1999, under President Bill Clinton.
GOP leaders said the vote was a symbolic victory that underscored the Republican-held Congress' willingness to cut federal spending that it viewed as inappropriate and wasteful.
"I appreciate all the work the administration has done in identifying wasteful spending," Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the majority leader, said in a speech before the vote. "Now it's time for the Senate to do its part to cut some of that waste out of the budget. It's a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue."
But the process left even some Republicans who ultimately voted for the bill uncomfortable. A number of senators said the administration had not provided details about what specific programs would be affected.
"If we find out that some of these programs that we've communicated should be out of bounds -- that advisers to the president decide they are going to cut anyway," Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring, said, "then there will be a reckoning for that."
And even as GOP senators agreed to cancel funding at the White House's request, 10 of them signed a rare public letter to Vought demanding that he reverse a decision to withhold roughly $7 billion in congressionally approved funding to their states meant to bolster educational programs including after-school and summer programs.
"The decision to withhold this funding is contrary to President Trump's goal of returning K-12 education to the states," the Republicans wrote.
To win the votes of Republican senators who initially objected, GOP leaders agreed to strip out a $400 million cut that Trump requested to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. The White House signaled it would not contest the change.
They also shielded some funding for specific programs, including aid to Jordan and Egypt; Food for Peace, a program that provides food assistance to other countries; and some global health programs.
Another holdout, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who had previously indicated that he would oppose the request because of the cuts to public broadcasting, decided to support the package. He said he had been assured by top Trump administration officials that they would steer unspent funds "to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption" for next year.
Before the vote, the head of a network of Native radio and television stations privately appealed to Rounds to oppose the package, saying the deal he had made was unworkable.
"There is currently no clear path for redirecting these funds to tribal broadcasters without significant legislative and administrative changes," wrote Loris Taylor, president of Native Public Media.
The vote incensed Democrats, who argued that Republicans were ceding Congress' constitutional powers in the name of cutting a minuscule amount of spending, just weeks after passing their marquee tax bill that would add $4 trillion to federal deficits.
They warned that it could have dire consequences for future bipartisan negotiations to fund the government. Lawmakers are currently working to negotiate spending levels before a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.
"We have never, never before seen bipartisan investments slashed through a partisan rescissions package," said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. "Do not start now. Not when we are working, at this very moment, in a bipartisan way to pass our spending bills. Bipartisanship doesn't end with any one line being crossed; it erodes. It breaks down bit by bit, until one day there is nothing left."
The vote codified a number of executive actions the administration advanced earlier this year to gut foreign aid programs, many first undertaken by DOGE.
The effects on public media are yet to come.
NPR and PBS would survive -- only a small percentage of their funding comes from the federal government. But the cuts would force many local stations to sharply reduce their programming and operations as early as this fall. Many public broadcasters receive more than 50% of their budgets from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
That means the package could be a death sentence for some stations, which have survived several attempts to choke off funding over the decades. For other broadcasters, it would mean cutting back on local programming.
"We just don't have a lot of fat to trim elsewhere," Julie Overgaard, executive director for South Dakota Public Broadcasting, said in an interview before the vote.
"On the PBS side of things, I can't just start cherry-picking which national programs I want and only pay for those," she said. "So it really leaves me and many others with little choice but to look at the local programming that we self-generate."