House Republicans passed Donald Trump’s funding cut proposal just after midnight on Friday – clawing back $9bn in federal dollars.
The vote was split on party lines, 216-213, with two Republicans, Mike Turner of Ohio and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, opposing the package alongside all Democrats. The proposal will now go to the president’s desk to be signed and codified.
The chamber had faced a Friday deadline to pass the rescissions package demanded by Trump and approved by the Senate in the wee hours of Thursday morning, otherwise the administration will be obligated to spend about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs, and $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS.
The House had approved an initial version of the bill in June, but was obligated to consider it again after the Senate protected funds for Pepfar, a global Aids prevention program, and prevented some cuts to food assistance, maternal health and disease control.
The chamber’s vote hit a last-minute snag caused by the controversy over Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender who had a longstanding relationship with Trump in the 80s and 90s.
Seeking to capitalize on a growing furor among Republicans and their supporters over the Trump administration’s handling of documents related to the case, the Democratic minority twice this week offered amendments to unrelated legislation that would have compelled the release of files related to the case, forcing the GOP to vote them down.
Concerned about Democrats using a key committee’s consideration of the rescissions package to offer a third Epstein-related amendment, House Republican leaders held off on advancing the measure for several hours on Thursday afternoon. Ultimately, they agreed to hold a vote on a non-binding resolution calling for the release of files related to the financier’s case, and defeated an attempt by Democrats to add their own amendment to the rescissions package.
The Epstein case has grown into a crisis for Trump and the GOP ever since the justice department announced last week that, after a review of US government files, it had determined the financier’s 2019 death in federal custody was a suicide, and that no list of his clients existed to be made public.
Trump’s Maga coalition includes believers in a conspiracy theory that the “deep state” is covering up a global pedophile ring in which Epstein was a major figure, and that files exist to prove it. The president has strenuously denied that his administration is hiding anything, and insulted those who call for the documents’ release as “weaklings” who fell for a “radical left” hoax intended to discredit him.
Democrats, relegated to the minority in both chambers of Congress, have seized on that tension with an array of legislative maneuvers intended to make public any Epstein-related documents. On Tuesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, told a conservative podcaster who asked about the case: “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.”
Meanwhile, Thomas Massie, an iconoclastic Republican congressman who has repeatedly clashed with Trump, and the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna are trying to get a majority of the House to sign on to a petition that will force a vote on releasing the files, and has already received signatures from nine GOP lawmakers.
