Congress cleared a $9 billion package of spending cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting for President Trump’s signature, codifying a small portion of Department and Government Efficiency savings.
The Senate-amended measure, which restored $400 million to a global AIDS prevention program that the original package had cut, passed the House shortly after midnight Thursday through a 216-213 procedural vote that deemed the measure approved without a direct up or down vote.
Republicans used a process known as rescissions to enact the cuts so they could get it through the Senate without the threat of a filibuster.
The package, which originated as a request from the White House Office of Management and Budget, represents roughly 5% of the $190 billion in savings DOGE says it has identified.
The bulk of the cuts, $7.9 billion, come from various foreign aid accounts. The remaining $1.1 billion is a cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which effectively ends taxpayer funding for NPR, PBS and their local affiliates.
Republicans celebrated the measure’s passage as a fulfillment of their campaign promises.
“The era of woke and wasteful spending in the people’s government is over,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, Texas Republican. “The American people rejected this radical agenda. They rejected the failed policies of my Democratic colleagues and their unbridled spending that’s bankrupting this country.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued the bill “has nothing to do with waste, fraud and abuse.” The foreign aid cuts, he said, will weaken “America’s soft power all over the globe.”
“Why would we undermine our ability to use diplomacy, democracy and development, to protect our own national security?” Mr. Jeffries said.
The broadcasting cuts, he said, threaten public safety “and the ability of the American people to actually get information, particularly in rural America, that they may need through public radio or public television in the face of an emergency.”
Republicans say the broadcasting cuts will end the subsidy of the networks’ liberal bias and said the national outlets and the local affiliates can raise money through the private sector, like other media outlets.
The foreign aid cuts, the GOP says, are an effort to cut spending in accounts that the Biden administration used to direct to organizations and programs that supported sex changes in Guatemala, transgender comic books in Peru, electric buses in Rwanda and vegan food in Zambia, among other initiatives they derided as woke waste.
“The fact is, we can’t work in a bipartisan fashion to cut federal spending any more. And that wasn’t always the case,” House Rules Chairwoman Virginia Foxx said.
Democrats “are addicted to a tax-and-spend formula that’s been bankrupting our government,” the North Carolina Republican said. “But we won’t stand idly by. We won’t wait on Democrats to take their heads out of the sand or wake up from this woke-induced coma.”
Rep. Jim McCovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, derided the rescissions effort as “a joke” coming just weeks after Republicans voted to add $4 trillion to the deficit with “a massive tax giveaway for the rich.”
“That giveaway was 450 times the size of these rescissions,” he said.
