Senate Republicans on Wednesday won passage of a bill demanded by Donald Trump that will claw back $9bn Congress had previously approved for foreign aid programs and public broadcasting, as the White House moves to slash funding for government programs.
The legislation, known as a rescissions package, was approved by a narrow margin of 51 votes to 48. All Democrats opposed the bill, along with two Republicans.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, called it a “small, but important step toward fiscal sanity”.
The bill now returns to the House of Representatives for its final approval, ahead of a Friday deadline for Republicans to pass the legislation, otherwise the Trump administration will be obligated to spend the money.
The package will cancel $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, and about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs – both of which have fallen dramatically out of favor with Trump’s new administration.
But not all Republican senators shared that opposition, and on Tuesday, Thune agreed with demands to preserve $400m in funding for Pepfar, a program credited with saving millions of people from infection or death from HIV that was created in 2003 under the Republican president George W Bush.
Thune has described the rescissions package as “commonsense legislation” that will target “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending, a term Republicans have deployed repeatedly since Trump took office to criticize programs they seek to dismantle. Some cuts, he said, were recommended by the so-called “department of government efficiency” downsizing initiative that Elon Musk previously led.
“My Democrat colleagues may not want to acknowledge it, but we have a serious spending problem in this country,” Thune said during a floor speech on Tuesday. “And the very least we can do in response is to target some of the egregious misuses of taxpayer dollars that we are addressing today in this bill.”
Two of the Senate’s 53 Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, joined Democrats in voting against the legislation. “You don’t need to gut the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” Murkowski told the Senate. Trump and many fellow Republicans argue that spending on public broadcasting is an unnecessary expense and say its news coverage is blighted by an “anti-right bias”.
Murkowski also said the Trump administration had not provided assurances that battles against diseases such as malaria and polio worldwide would be maintained. She urged Congress to assert its role in deciding how federal funds were spent. Standalone rescissions packages have not passed in decades, with lawmakers reluctant to cede their constitutionally mandated control of spending.
Democrats had no leverage to stop the bill’s passage. While the minority party can use the Senate’s filibuster to stop the chamber from considering most legislation they oppose, a rescissions package is allowed to be passed with a simple majority. Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer condemned the bill as an opening salvo in the Trump administration’s offensive against important government services, and accused Republicans of giving up Congress’s constitutionally mandated control of federal spending.
“Today, Senate Republicans turn this chamber into a subservient rubber stamp for the executive, at the behest of Donald Trump,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, representing New York, said. “Republicans embrace the credo of cut, cut, cut now, and ask questions later.”
• Reuters contributed reporting
