The House of Representatives voted to send a rescissions package clawing back $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting to President Donald Trump’s desk shortly after midnight Friday.
Representatives voted 216 to 213 to approve the president’s rescissions package with just two House Republicans, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio, voting “no” on the legislation. Passage of the rescissions bill is a significant victory for Trump who was the first commander-in-chief to have a clawback funding request approved by Congress in more than 25 years.
“REPUBLICANS HAVE TRIED DOING THIS FOR 40 YEARS, AND FAILED….BUT NO MORE. THIS IS BIG!!!” Trump wrote in a post to the social media platform Truth Social following the vote, referring to the bill’s elimination of funding for public broadcasting.
Fitzpatrick and Turner also voted against the rescissions bill when it was initially under consideration by the House in June. Two other GOP lawmakers, Reps. Nicole Malliotakis of New York and Mark Amodei of Nevada, flipped their votes to “yes” when the lower chamber considered the legislation for a second time, citing the Senate amending the package to protect some funding for global AIDS relief as well as other global health and food assistance programs.
Congressional GOP leaders were up against a Friday deadline to send the spending clawbacks to the president’s desk and they managed to piece together enough votes with roughly 24 hours to spare. If lawmakers had failed to pass the measure by Friday at midnight, Trump would have been forced to spend the $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting.
Passage of the rescissions bill delivers on the president’s commitment to shutter the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and defund NPR and PBS, which Republicans have long accused of being biased against conservative viewpoints.
The package specifically claws back $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CBP) over the next two years. The CBP is a private nonprofit that partly finances NPR and PBS.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shot down claims from public broadcasting entities that cuts to their funding would jeopardize public safety due to their participation in issuing emergency alerts during natural disasters.
“I’m not sure how NPR helps the public safety of our country, but I do know that NPR unfortunately has become, really just a propaganda voice for the left,” Leavitt said Thursday during a briefing with reporters.
The rescissions package is the first piece of legislation to codify cuts identified by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). There is still roughly $164 billion in federal spending pinpointed by Trump’s cost-cutting department as wasteful that Congress has yet to claw back.
“The American people will no longer be forced to fund politically biased media and more than $8 billion in outrageous expenses overseas,” Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement following the vote.
The speaker also called for the passage of additional rescissions bills before the midterms, echoing White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought’s earlier comments Thursday that the administration would send Congress more requests to claw back previously allocated spending soon.
Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican in a purple Pennsylvania district, had also voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, citing the legislation’s reforms to Medicaid.
Trump told reporters following that vote that he was “disappointed” by Fitzpatrick’s opposition to his signature piece of legislation, but declined to immediately advocate for a primary challenge.
House Democrats voted against the rescissions bill, arguing the clawback request infringed on Congress’ authority to determine the appropriation of government funding. The rescissions package notably circumvented Democrats’ opposition because it was subject to a simple majority vote in both chambers.
“This rescissions bill is another effort to subvert the Congress’ power of the purse,” Democratic Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democratic appropriator in the House, said Thursday.
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), House Republicans’ campaign arm, hammered Democrats’ united opposition to slashing just 0.1% of the federal government’s roughly $7 trillion budget.
“This vote painted a clear contrast: House Republicans cut the nonsense while Democrats fund the absurd,” NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella said in a statement. “Voters are fed up with seeing their hard-earned money bankroll the radical left’s agenda.”
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