US House Republicans pass Trump's $9bln funding cut to media, foreign aid
The chamber voted 216 to 213 in favor of the funding cut package, altered by the Senate this week to exclude cuts of about $400 million in funds for the global PEPFAR HIV/AIDS prevention program.
Only two House Republicans voted against the cut, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania and Mike Turner from Ohio, along with Democrats.
'We are taking one small step to cut wasteful spending, but one giant leap towards fiscal sanity,' said Representative Aaron Bean, a Florida Republican, advocating for a similar spending cut package from the White House every month.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries countered that the funding cut 'undermines our ability to keep our people safe here and to project America's soft power all over the globe,' and argued rural Americans' access to emergency information on public radio will be diminished.
The funding vote was delayed for hours amid Republican disagreements about other legislation, and calls from some members of the party for more government transparency about the deceased convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
To satisfy the Epstein-related concerns without holding up the funding cut bill any longer, Republicans on the House Rules committee introduced a resolution that calls for the release of Epstein documents by the U.S. attorney general within 30 days.
'It's a sound, good-faith resolution that ensures protections for victims and innocent witnesses,' said Representative Virginia Foxx from North Carolina, the Republican leader of the rules committee.
But the top Democrat on the rules panel, Representative Jim McGovern from Massachusetts, blasted the resolution as a 'glorified press release' because it lacks an enforcement mechanism to make the Justice Department comply.
When the chamber finally voted on the funding cut, it was the second close House vote on Trump's request to claw back the funds previously approved by Democrats and his fellow Republicans in Congress.
In June, four Republicans joined Democrats to vote against an earlier version of the rescissions package, which passed 214-212.
House Republicans felt extra pressure to pass the Senate version as Trump's administration would have been forced to spend the money if Congress did not approve the cuts by Friday.
The $9 billion cut amounts to roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of the $6.8 trillion federal budget.
Republicans say the foreign aid funds previously went to programs they deem wasteful, and they say the $1 billion in public media funding supports radio stations and PBS television that are biased against conservative viewpoints.
Predawn senate vote
In a 51-48 Senate vote before dawn on Thursday, only two Republicans, Senators Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, voted against the funding cut.
Both questioned why Congress -- constitutionally responsible for the power of the purse -- was taking direction from the executive branch to slash funding.
'There's a good reason I think that we haven't seen a successful rescissions package before the Senate in almost 33 years,' Murkowski said in a Senate floor speech this week, 'It's because we've recognized that, 'Hey, that's our role here.' '
Funding cuts are regularly approved with bipartisan support in Congress through the appropriations process.
But Democratic leaders this week warned this one-party cut could damage the necessary bipartisanship to pass funding bills.
Funding bills require bipartisan support to reach the necessary 60-vote threshold for government funding legislation to pass the Senate, but a recissions package only requires a simple majority in both congressional chambers to pass.
Trump administration officials have promised to send more rescissions requests to Congress if the foreign aid and broadcasting package succeeds.
This week's funding clawback represents only a tiny portion of all the funds approved by Congress that the Trump administration has held up while it has pursued sweeping cuts.
Democratic lawmakers say the administration has blocked more than $425 billion of spending approved by Congress since Trump's second term began in January.
After the measure cleared the Senate, the White House's Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said more such spending-cut requests are 'likely' to be made by the Trump administration.
Murkowski, Collins and some Democratic appropriators also condemned a Thursday comment Vought made to reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, where he said the 'appropriations process has to be less bipartisan.'
'The best way for us to counter what has been said by the OMB director is to continue to work in a bipartisan way,' Collins, who chairs the Senate appropriations committee, said as her committee debated government funding for the next fiscal year.
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Asharq Al-Awsat
an hour ago
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Congress Approves Trump's $9 billion Cut to Public Broadcasting, Foreign Aid
The House gave final approval to President Donald Trump's request to claw back about $9 billion for public broadcasting and foreign aid early Friday as Republicans intensified their efforts to target institutions and programs they view as bloated or out of step with their agenda. The vote marked the first time in decades that a president has successfully submitted such a rescissions request to Congress, and the White House suggested it won't be the last. Some Republicans were uncomfortable with the cuts, yet supported them anyway, wary of crossing Trump or upsetting his agenda. The House passed the bill by a vote of 216-213. It now goes to Trump for his signature, The AP news reported. 'We need to get back to fiscal sanity and this is an important step,' said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. 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The effort to claw back a sliver of federal spending came just weeks after Republicans also muscled through Trump's tax and spending cut bill without any Democratic support. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that measure will increase the U.S. debt by about $3.3 trillion over the coming decade. "No one is buying the the notion that Republicans are actually trying to improve wasteful spending,' said Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. A heavy blow to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting The cancellation of $1.1 billion for the CPB represents the full amount it is due to receive during the next two budget years. The White House says the public media system is politically biased and an unnecessary expense. The corporation distributes more than two-thirds of the money to more than 1,500 locally operated public television and radio stations, with much of the remainder assigned to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service to support national programming. Democrats were unsuccessful in restoring the funding in the Senate. Lawmakers with large rural constituencies voiced particular concern about what the cuts to public broadcasting could mean for some local public stations in their state. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the stations are "not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.' As the Senate debated the bill Tuesday, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the remote Alaska Peninsula, triggering tsunami warnings on local public broadcasting stations that advised people to get to higher ground. Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said he secured a deal from the White House that some money administered by the Interior Department would be repurposed to subsidize Native American public radio stations in about a dozen states. 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Triggered by the official rescissions request from the White House, the legislation only needed a simple majority vote to advance in the Senate instead of the 60 votes usually required to break a filibuster. That meant Republicans could use their 53-47 majority to pass it along party lines. Two Republican senators, Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, joined with Democrats in voting against the bill, though a few other Republicans also raised concerns about the process. 'Let's not make a habit of this,' said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who voted for the bill but said he was wary that the White House wasn't providing enough information on what exactly will be cut. Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the imminent successful passage of the rescissions shows 'enthusiasm' for getting the nation's fiscal situation under control. 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Arab News
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US getting creative in search for Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal
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Al Arabiya
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Despite the overall sense that wealthy people will be the primary beneficiaries, Democrats and independents are much likelier than Republicans to think the law could harm them personally. Nathan Hay, a shift service manager at an international dealership that repairs trucks, said he thinks lower-income people might see a slight increase in taxes but still supports the bill. 'Personally, it's not helping me a ton,' Hay said, but he believes it will help small businesses, which have been a staple in his own life and his family's. About half of Republicans expect the legislation to do more to help people like you compared with about 2 in 10 independents and just 6 percent of Democrats. 'I'm not a tax accountant, but it sounds as if it would be more beneficial to (people) in the higher tax level,' said Republican Geraldine Putnam, 87, a Trump voter who lives in the rural south. 'It's not that I would want to take away the incentive to become more wealthy—that's the American dream,' Putnam said. But she also thinks she'll end up paying more in taxes. 'What he's doing, I'm sure he thinks is correct,' she said of Trump. 'It's just the extreme method that he's using.' Trump approval on government spending. The law's hefty price tag may be factoring into some Americans' assessments of the law. The poll found they are less likely to approve of how Trump is handling government spending since the spring. Just 38 percent of Americans approve of how Donald Trump is handling government spending compared with 46 percent in an AP-NORC poll conducted in March. Republicans are less likely to say the government is spending too much than they were in March 2023 when Joe Biden was president, but about 6 in 10 still think the government is overspending. A similar share of Democrats say the same thing. Putnam, now a retiree, took issue with Trump's cuts in federal workers, even though she says she approves of being able to trim off people who aren't really doing their jobs. The way she sees it, Trump drew attention to people abusing social services then fires the people in the office that are investigating that very fraud and abuse. 'What's the sense in that?' she asked. The AP-NORC poll of 1437 adults was conducted July 10-14 using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the US population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
