The Senate voted early Thursday to claw back $9 billion in federal funding for global aid programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, sending the package requested by President Trump to the House for a final vote.
The 51-48 vote on what’s known as a rescissions package is a victory for Trump, who has vowed to shrink the size of the federal government, and who has come under fire from Democrats for adding a projected $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade by signing his One Big, Beautiful Bill Act into law earlier this month.
Senators finally passed the package after 2 a.m. Thursday after voting for more than 12 hours on amendments.
The win is more symbolic than anything, as it would cut only one tenth of 1 percent from the federal budget.
Even so, Republicans see it as important progress.
“It’s a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said before the final vote.
Trump failed to get a $15 billion rescissions package passed during his first term after Senate Republicans balked at the proposal.
This time around, Trump is working with a bigger Senate Republican majority and a GOP conference that is generally more amenable to his agenda than it was seven years ago.
Thune was able to get Trump’s latest rescissions bill over the finish line even though two senior Republicans on the Appropriations Committee voted “no.”
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the chair of the Interior Appropriations subcommittees, opposed the package.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the chair of the Defense Appropriation subcommittee, voted “no” on two procedural votes Tuesday night but voted in favor of final passage.
Democrats were missing Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), who was hospitalized after feeling unwell.
Collins on several occasions before the final vote raised concerns about what she saw as the White House’s failure to offer sufficient details about how the funding rescissions would be implemented. She raised that issue directly with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought at a lunch meeting Tuesday.
Senate Republican leaders lined up the votes after the White House agreed to an amendment to remove from the package the $400 million in cuts to the PEPFAR global anti-AIDS initiative launched by former President George W. Bush more than 20 years ago.
Thune told reporters Tuesday that saving PEPFAR was deep cuts was a top priority of many GOP senators.
The bill would still cut nearly $8 billion from an assortment of international programs, including development assistance, the economic support fund, USAID global health programs and programs to assist refugees and victims of international disasters.
It would cut more than $1 billion dollars from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would hit rural radio stations that depend more on federal funding than their big-city counterparts.
Republicans hailed the cuts to public broadcasting, something that Trump proposed during his first term but failed to achieve, as a big victory.
“I hope that the administration keeps sending us rescissions packages, that’s the only way I can see us reducing spending,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said.
“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, we’re going to cut them off like a dead stump,” he said, pointing to National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher’s social media post from 2020 that “America is addicted to white supremacy.”
But some Republicans, including Murkowski, expressed concern that defunding public broadcasting would hurt radio stations that are often the only sources of information during natural disasters in her home state.
She pointed out Wednesday that a powerful 7.3 magnitude earthquake in the Aleutian chain has forced communities along a 700-mile stretch of Alaska’s coastline to evacuate, and many of those residents rely on public radio for news.
“Seven-point-three [magnitude] earthquake off of Alaska and tsunami warnings. You know how I got this information? From public broadcasting,” she said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said at the Hill Nation Summit on Wednesday that the cuts could put rural radio stations in her home state out of business.
“These rural stations are often the lifeblood of these communities when it comes to emergency alerts,” she said.
“These are things that, they sound small, but they are what bring communities together,” she added.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the legislation would have “devastating consequences.”
“This bill will harm America’s farmers and researchers and businesses, make the world an easier place, unfortunately, for terrorist recruitment, and reward Communist China and [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” Schumer said of the cuts to global aide programs.
“Republicans are rushing forward without a clue how these unhinged cuts will be implemented,” he declared.
Democrats tried and failed to amend the legislation to spare various federal programs from cuts.
An amendment sponsored by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) to shield $496 million for international disaster relief from being rescinded failed by a vote of 49 to 50, although Collins, Murkowski and McConnell voted for it.
And a motion sponsored by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) to recommit the bill back to the Appropriations Committee with instructions to restore Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding failed by a vote of 48 to 51.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) offered an amendment to strike the rescission of $785 million appropriated for the Feed the Future Program, a global hunger and food security initiative, praising the program for helping to “save lives, promote self-reliance” and create new opportunities for trade. It failed by a vote of 48 to 51.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) offered a substitute amendment that had been contemplated by Collins to reduce the cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and global health programs. It would have also protected NATO dues and funding to Ukraine.
Kelly offered Collins’s amendment after the Maine senator decided it didn’t have a chance of being adopted by the House.
Republicans voted to table the amendment, 51 to 47.
Schumer warned in a “Dear Colleague” letter last month that the Republican push to rescind funding that Congress had agreed to on a bipartisan basis in the past could threaten the chances of reaching any spending deals later this year.
He said Republican senators know it’s “absurd” to expect Democrats “to act as business as usual and engage in a bipartisan appropriations process to fund the government while they concurrently plot to pass a purely partisan rescissions bill.”
The legislation now heads to the House, where lawmakers must pass it by Friday or otherwise the Office of Management and Budget will be forced to release its hold on the funding it has targeted for rescission.
Thune, speaking to reporters Tuesday, described the amended language to restore the funding for the Bush-era anti-AIDS initiative as a “small modification” and expressed hope that the House would accept the Senate’s work.
