Senate GOP approves bill to slash foreign aid and public broadcasting funds

Senate Republicans blasted through Democratic and internal opposition to pass President Donald Trump’s multibillion-dollar clawback package early Thursday morning.

The $9 billion rescissions bill tees up cuts to “woke” spending on foreign aid programs and NPR and PBS that Congress previously approved. Republicans have pitched the bill as building on their quest to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that it was a mission shared by the GOP and Trump, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) identified many of the cuts included in the package.  

“I appreciate all the work the administration has done in identifying wasteful spending,” Thune said. “And 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.”

The president’s rescissions package proposed cutting just shy of $8 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and over $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the government-backed funding arm for NPR and PBS.

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It’s likely the first of many to come from the White House.

Unlike the previous procedural votes, Vice President JD Vance was not needed to break a tie, with only two Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Susan Collins, R-Maine, joining all Senate Democrats to oppose the bill. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., voted against the preceding procedural votes to advance the package on Tuesday night, but ultimately backed the bill. 

It now heads to the House, where Republicans have warned the Senate to not make changes to the package. But just like during the budget reconciliation process earlier this month, the warnings from House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and fiscal hawks fell on deaf ears in the upper chamber.

The Senate GOP’s version of the bill is indeed smaller, by about $400 million, after Senate leaders agreed to make a carveout that spared international Bush-era HIV and AIDS prevention funding.

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Other attempts were made during a marathon vote-a-rama process to make changes to the bill, but none were able to surmount the 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber.

Senate Democrats tried to kneecap the bill with amendments that targeted what they argued were cuts that would diminish emergency alerts for extreme weather and disasters, erode America’s and isolate rural Americans by creating news deserts with cuts to public broadcasting, among others.

“Why are we talking about cutting off emergency alerts,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, said. “That’s 1,000 times these stations were warned to tell people that their lives were in danger.”

Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, contended that much more was at stake than the spending cuts.

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The Washington Democrat charged that lawmakers were also “voting on how the Senate is going to spend the rest of this year, are we just going to do rescission after rescission, because we know Russ Vought is just itching to send us more.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., rebuked Democrats’ assertions against the bill, and pitched the legislation as a way for lawmakers to “course correct” wasteful spending that shouldn’t have ever been green-lit.

He told Fox News Digital that what Democrats want to do is “keep as much of this money for their woke pet projects as they can.” 

“They were able to do that for four years,” he said. “That’s how you got to, you know, DEIs in Burma and Guatemalan sex changes and voter ID in Haiti, which is ironic, because Democrats don’t support voter ID here, but they’re willing to pay it for it in another country.”