House Republicans have narrowly advanced a request from the White House to claw back $9.4 billion that lawmakers have already approved for public media and more than a dozen accounts across the State Department focused on foreign assistance.
The 214-212 vote is a major victory for President Donald Trump, who had been lobbying hard for lawmakers to pass the legislation, including in a social media post shortly before members went to the floor.
“For decades, Republicans have promised to cut NPR, but have never done it, until now,” Trump said, in part. “The Rescissions Bill is a NO BRAINER, and every single Republican in Congress should vote, ‘YES.’ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
It’s also a huge relief for Speaker Mike Johnson, who hours earlier was projecting cautious optimism that the package of funding cuts would pass despite knowing his margins were exceedingly narrow.
“We think we have the votes. We’re going ahead with it,” Johnson told reporters Thursday afternoon.
One “yes” vote: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who is known to frequently break with his party.
“First time I’ve ever seen us cut spending in my life. I would be ‘yea’ all day long,” Massie said in a brief interview earlier this week, previewing his support.
The legislation would revoke $8.3 billion in foreign aid and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting. It faced opposition from some Republican lawmakers concerned about slashing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and how emergency alerts could be impacted by the public media cuts.
House Republican leadership and White House officials spent days trying to assuage the concerns of lawmakers worried that the clawbacks would hurt their local public broadcasting stations, emergency alert systems and efforts to prevent AIDS around the world.
The fight to convince House Republicans continued up until the final gavel on Thursday. Johnson and Whip Tom Emmer huddled with the holdouts on the House floor during the vote to try to sway them in favor of the measure after they had already voted against the measure.
At one point, as many as six Republicans were recorded as voting “no” — enough to tank the bill. Two of those holdouts, Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Nick LaLota of New York, flipped to yes, handing Johnson — and Trump — the win. GOP Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Nicole Malliotakis of New York and Mike Turner of Ohio opposed the bill.
In defense of cuts to public broadcasting, senior GOP lawmakers argued that the local PBS affiliates in their home states do good work but that those in some other states air inappropriate programming.
“These stations are some of the most partisan stations out there. Can you imagine if a conservative station was funded? The left would have screamed, vilified and exterminated it a long while ago,” said Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), during floor debate.
Democrats countered that’s a lie. “That’s BS. It’s total BS,” Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s top Democratic appropriator, said in a brief interview. “These comments that it’s ‘woke’ in this state or that — what the hell do you know? Nothing.”
Still, there are discussions underway among many appropriators that they could try to offset some of these slashes in upcoming spending bills, since the funding cuts won’t impact accounts until after the new fiscal year kicks in come October 1.
“I am concerned about the future of trying to do away with public television. I’m a supporter of public television in Idaho, they do a fantastic job,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, who ultimately voted in favor of the bill.
The package now heads to the Senate, where Republicans are discussing whether they can amend it – despite the complicated mechanics for doing so. The rescissions process was created under the decades-old law enacted to block presidents from withholding federal cash Congress has already approved.
The Senate also has the option to approve sections of the package piecemeal and reject others. That’s what Congress did back in 1995 when the House and Senate approved a rescissions package that clawed back less funding than then-President Bill Clinton had requested to cut. But doing that would send it back to the House, where passage a second time may not be guaranteed.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the package “could be” changed in the Senate. “We’ll see,” he told reporters Thursday.
“I would expect that rescissions package probably will be a July timeframe,” Thune said.
Congress has until midnight on July 18 to act on the legislation, otherwise the proposal will expire and the White House is required to spend the money as lawmakers intended.
Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.
