(The Epoch Times)—The U.S. Senate on July 16 voted to pass $9 billion in spending cuts requested by President Donald Trump, including cuts to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
The measure passed in a 51–48 vote. Two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), voted against the bill. Although having voted against the bill in an earlier procedural vote, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decided to back the bill. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) missed the vote due to being in hospital.
The early morning passage of the bill came after a long voting series with a flurry of amendments from Democratic lawmakers.
The passage of the spending cuts, called rescissions, marks a major political win for Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).
Speaking after the vote, Thune said of the rescissions bill, “It’s a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue.”
Moments earlier, he said of what could become the first rescissions passed by Congress in 35 years, “Our country is 36 trillion dollars in debt. We can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. What we’re talking about here is 1/10th of 1 percent of all federal spending but it’s a step in the right direction.”
With its $9 billion top line in cuts, the bill represents one of the largest rescissions ever passed through the Senate under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It’s $400 million less than the original House-passed package, after cuts related to an anti-HIV initiative were stripped from the bill.
The Senate has historically been the most challenging hurdle for rescission bills.
Because alterations were made to the bill passed by the House on June 12, the legislation will need to return to the lower chamber for another vote.
PEPFAR and ‘Soft Power’
Most of the bill’s cuts—$7.9 billion—stem from rescissions of funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). These are linked to several controversial international social projects undertaken during President Joe Biden’s administration, identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Initially, a $400 million cut to the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program was included in the package, but this was cut in order to win over enough votes to pass the bill.
PEPFAR, initiated by President George W. Bush with the intention of ending the international HIV/AIDS pandemic by 2030, has been a flashpoint in Republicans’ fight to pass the cuts. The program focuses on HIV prevention, care, and treatment programs in partner countries, with the aim of reducing the spread of the disease.
McConnell and Collins tied their opposition, in part, to the cuts to USAID.
During a previous Senate hearing on the bill, McConnell said that such funding was important to the United States’ ability to internationally project “soft power,” power using non-military means.
“Over my years in Senate, the biggest supporters of soft power I’ve run into have been the military generals, who are fully aware of how much more costly it is to have a war than to prevent one,” McConnell said.
“Soft power, at very little expense, goes a long way.”
Collins echoed these concerns.
Office of Management and the Budget Director Russ Vought, a leading supporter of the bill within the administration, responded that the foreign aid cuts had been carefully chosen to solely target waste and abuse, telling the panel, “This is not a fade on soft power.”
“[Secretary of State Marco Rubio and I are] going line by line in each of these programs to articulate where we believe soft power could be effective, where we think that investment on the front end will keep us out of long-term, hard power conflicts of that nature,” Vought said.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The other $1.1 billion comes from funding cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees NPR and PBS.
Members of both parties have had reservations about these cuts.
“The bill will starve local and rural radio stations,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a speech on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) initially said he was opposed to the bill due to the impact these cuts could have on his constituents, but was later brought into alignment with the legislation after negotiations with the president.
Collins and Murkowski have also expressed skepticism toward the Corporation for Public Broadcasting cuts.
House Wanted Passage ‘As Is’
Several lawmakers in the House have indicated their preference for the Senate to have passed the rescissions “as is” without substantial changes, as there is a July 18 deadline for final passage of the bill after which the same cuts cannot be reintroduced by the president.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has indicated multiple times that he would have preferred the Senate pass the bill without revisions.
“The Friday deadline looms. We’re encouraging our Senate partners over there to get the job done and to pass it as is,” Johnson said during a Tuesday leadership press conference.
Other Republicans in the House echoed the sentiment.
“The Senate needs to do its job and pass the entire $9.4 billion so that we can set the stage for even more rescissions,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) said during a July 16 interview with Newsmax.
Responding to reports that the Senate would remove the cuts to PEPFAR funding, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times on July 15, “I think the Senate should take up the bill as we wrote it in the House. You know what we’re doing is really just codifying waste, fraud, and abuse [cuts] that the DOGE team found.”
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Va.) was critical of the Senate for the revisions.
“We’re aware that under normal circumstances, the Republicans in the Senate are not as fiscally as responsible as the Republicans in the House,“ Grothman told reporters. ”So this is disappointing but not surprising news.”
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