Senate Republicans early Thursday greenlit President Donald Trump’s proposal to claw back billions in global health and public media funding, pushing past frustrations within the GOP conference about the White House’s transparency during the process.
The White House-requested spending cuts narrowly made it through the Senate in a 51-48 vote after GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine voted “no” alongside Democrats. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) missed the vote, with her staff disclosing Wednesday that she was being kept in the hospital overnight “out of an abundance of caution.”
Because Senate Republicans made changes to the legislation it will need to bounce back to the House, which is expected to vote on it later Thursday. Trump will need to sign the recissions bill by the end of Friday, otherwise he will be forced to spend the money Congress previously approved.
“What we are talking about is one-tenth of one percent of all federal spending … but it’s a step in the right direction and it’s the first time we have done anything like this in 35 years,” Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said early Thursday morning.
It marks the first time in decades that a rescissions package has been approved by the Senate. In 2018, the GOP-controlled chamber narrowly blocked a $15 billion request from Trump, after Collins and then-Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina opposed it.
Even though Trump was successful now, however, there was still plenty of drama. To help address a swath of GOP concerns, the administration agreed to drop a $400 million cut to the global AIDS fighting program, PEPFAR, from the original, $9.4 billion proposal. That brought the Senate GOP bill down to roughly $9 billion.
Republicans added language vowing that other areas related to food aid, maternal health, malaria and tuberculosis wouldn’t be impacted and that certain food assistance programs would be protected.The administration also privately vowed to move around other funding to help offset funding cuts to rural public news stations to win over Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D).
As part of their roughly 12 hour marathon voting session, Republicans also defeated attempts by Democrats, and some of their GOP colleagues, to strip out spending cuts to global health funds, public broadcasting and international disasters. GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Collins and Murkowski supported some of these amendments, but they needed more Republicans to join them.
Not enough of them did. And McConnell, who had been viewed as likely to oppose the rescissions package, ultimately voted for it on final passage.
Murkowski offered one doomed amendment that would have restored most of the money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which largely funds PBS and NPR. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) put forward another amendment originally authored by Collins that would have further reduced the size of the clawback from $9 billion to $6.5 billion.
Collins had decided not to offer that amendment herself over questions about whether it would sink the overall bill —and compel the Senate to revert back to original plans to cut $9.4 billion in previously-approved federal funding, which she opposes even more.
Yet even as most Republicans voted for the package, several did so only after voicing their displeasure. Though White House budget director Russ Vought provided a “matrix” of accounts that would be impacted in the closed door Senate lunch, Republicans remained widely frustrated with the Office of Management and Budget, which they felt had not provided sufficient details about the scope of the funding cuts on the table.
“Let’s not consider this a precedent,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who said he was supporting the bill “with reservation.”
Wicker added, from the chamber floor, “if you come back to us again, Mr. Director of the OMB — if you come back to us again from the executive branch — give us the specific amounts and the specific programs that will be cut.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), hours before voting for the package, said, “I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret. … And I suspect that when we do we’ll have to come back and fix it.”
Hanging over Republicans in consideration of the bill was a dual political threat. First, Vought has been flirting with trying to leapfrog Congress altogether on spending cuts by challenging the Impoundment Control Act. The 1974 law prevents the executive branch from pulling back federal funding that’s already been appropriated, but Vought has questioned its constitutionality. Rejecting the $9 billion rescissions request could have exacerbated this tension between Republicans and the administration.
Second, Trump’s GOP allies were also openly warning the president would become incensed if Congress failed to enact a major priority, opening up a political breach with the party’s standard-bearer heading into a crucial government funding fight this fall. Trump had gone so far as to warn he would not endorse Republicans who voted against it.
That wasn’t enough to win over every Republican, though. Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, singled out OMB for not providing enough information when she announced her opposition. She said in a statement that the rescissions package “has a big problem – nobody really knows what program reductions are in it.”
Murkowski, meanwhile, said Congress should be “doing more when it comes down to our own authorities, our constitutional authorities, when it comes to the power of the purse.”
Democrats, and some Republicans, have also warned that passing a rescissions package largely along party lines undercuts their larger government funding talks, where they will likely need bipartisan support to get even a short-term funding patch through the Senate.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has advanced two bills and are expected to vote on two more Thursday: a measure to fund Department of Veterans’ Affairs as well as the legislation to fund activities within the Departments of Commerce and Justice, which was derailed last week over a fight around funding for relocating the FBI headquarters.
“Republicans are putting a blindfold over their own eyes and leading rural Americans off a cliff, just to make Donald Trump and his billionaire friends happy,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday. “Well, Democrats are not here to merely rubber stamp whatever Donald Trump does, just like the Republicans are doing.”
Schumer sent a letter to Senate Democrats earlier this month warning that Republicans should not bank on Democrats supporting the larger government funding effort if GOP senators vote to approve the Trump-requested cuts. Democratic senators are already under enormous pressure from their base to not agree to a funding deal negotiated only by Republicans — even a short-term funding patch — after their leadership faced a whirlwind of backlash earlier this year for paving the way for passage of a GOP-negotiated continuing resolution.
“It will become hard, maybe even impossible, to write a bipartisan budget ever again, because the minority party knows they can get double crossed,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). He warned his GOP colleagues they should expect Democrats to use rescissions in a similar way: “Democrats will do it to you when we are back in charge.”
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.