The House narrowly passed a $9 billion package of DOGE spending cuts just after midnight on Friday, approving a White House request to cancel money that Congress had previously provided for foreign aid and public broadcasting.
The House vote had been delayed during the day as Republicans decided how to handle a separate matter: the renewed calls for the release of information pertaining to the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Yet even as the White House and congressional Republicans have struggled to quell the uproar about the case, the House’s passage of the spending cuts delivers another legislative victory for President Donald Trump.
The House vote was 216-213. Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio were the lone Republicans to break with their party and oppose the cuts.
The Senate had passed the rescissions package one night earlier, shortly after 2 a.m. Thursday, following some 12 hours of votes on amendments. The final package sent over to the House stripped out $400 million in cuts to PEPFAR, the global AIDS-prevention program. But Democratic efforts to strip $1.1 billion in cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR and PBS, were blocked by Republicans.
The 51-48 Senate vote on the amended bill saw two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, join with Democrats in opposing the cuts. Democratic Sen. Tina Smith did not vote after falling ill and being admitted to the hospital on Wednesday.
Collins, the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, complained that the White House Office of Management and Budget hadn’t provided the customary level of detail about the requested cuts. “The rescissions package has a big problem — nobody really knows what program reductions are in it,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “That isn’t because we haven’t had time to review the bill. Instead, the problem is that OMB has never provided the details that would normally be part of this process.”
Other Republicans expressed concerns about the cuts but backed the White House anyway. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said that, in an ideal world, the cuts in this rescissions package would be as detailed as the last successful presidential rescissions, which passed in 1992. “I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret, some second and third order effects, and I suspect that when we do, we’ll have to come back and fix them,” Tillis said in remarks on the Senate floor. “We have no earthly idea what specific cuts will occur, but I’m willing to give OMB and the president the benefit of the doubt that they’re going to be responsible cuts.”
Why it matters, part 1: The cuts to foreign aid programs and public broadcasting could have wide-ranging effects. While Republicans said they were eliminating “woke” and “wasteful” spending, Democrats warned that bipartisan foreign policy objectives would be hurt along with more than 1,500 local public radio and television stations, costing jobs and potentially jeopardizing the ability to deliver emergency alerts to certain communities.
Why it matters, part 2: Beyond that, both Republicans and Democrats also spoke about this rescissions package as having implications for the federal budget and appropriations process. Republicans see it as the first of several bills to cut even more spending. Democrats, meanwhile, warn that the cuts undermine the annual funding process. They say they have little reason to work with Republicans on bipartisan spending bills if the GOP will just come back to pass partisan cuts. While rescissions bills can pass with a simple majority, annual spending measures to fund the government past September require 60 votes in the Senate, meaning that Democratic support will be needed.
“It is no secret the path to advancing more of our bills is going to be harder because of the unprecedented, partisan rescissions bill that Republicans just passed,” Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democratic appropriator, said Thursday. “It is extremely frustrating to see so many of the colleagues that have worked with us to pass funding bills turn around and vote to rip away the funding that we all agreed on.”
House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole, a Republican, acknowledged to reporters this week that repeated use of rescissions could be risky. He said they may “destroy a certain amount of goodwill that I think cost you down the road if you do it too much.”
Vought pushes for partisanship: White House Budget Director Russell Vought isn’t all that concerned about bipartisanship in the government funding process. “The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan,” he said Thursday at a Christian Science Monitor event, according to Politico.
“It’s not going to keep me up at night, and I think will lead to better results, by having the appropriations process be a little bit partisan, and I don’t think it’s necessarily leading to a shutdown,” he added.
Vought reportedly did not explain how partisan spending bills might get through the Senate without Democratic votes. And he refused to commit to abiding by any bipartisan spending deals or avoiding rescissions requests on future appropriations.
“We are willing to send up additional rescissions,” Vought said. “I think if this continues to pass, we’re likely to send up another rescissions package that would come soon, and we’ll be working on that to try to get that across the finish line.”
Murray criticized Vought and said her Senate colleagues would have to decide whether they agree with his push for a more partisan approach, which she said would be less effective.
“This is the budget chief who ignores our laws and he rubs it in our faces. He does not respect the role of this committee or any appropriator here, Republican or Democrat,” she said. “So I do hope we can stand together and stand for our communities and stand up for Congress as a co-equal branch of this government.”
The bottom line: Passage of the rescissions package is another win for Trump as he nears the six-month mark of his second term. Fiscal hawks in the GOP may celebrate the spending cuts codifying DOGE’s work, but the $9 billion in savings pales in comparison to the $4 trillion in higher deficits expected to result from Trump’s big bill.