Team Blitz India
THE House gave final approval to President Donald Trump’s request to claw back about $9 billion for public broadcasting and foreign aid on July 18 as Republicans intensified their efforts to target institutions and programmes they view as bloated or out of step with their agenda.
The House passed the bill by a vote of 216-213. It now goes to Trump for his signature.
“We need to get back to fiscal sanity and this is an important step,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. No Democrats supported the measure when it passed the Senate, 51-48, in the early morning hours on July 17. Final passage in the House was delayed for several hours as Republicans wrestled with their response to Democrats’ push for a vote on the release of Jeffrey Epstein files.
The package cancels about $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and nearly $8 billion for a variety of foreign aid programmes, many designed to help countries where drought, disease and political unrest endure.
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 the measure will increase the U.S. debt by about $3.3 trillion over the coming decade. “No one is buying the notion that Republicans are actually trying to improve wasteful spending,” said Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. 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 twothirds 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.
Among the foreign aid cuts are $800 million for a programme that provides emergency shelter, water and family reunification for refugees and $496 million to provide food, water and health care for countries hit by natural disasters and conflicts. There also is a $4.15 billion cut for programmes that aim to boost economies and democratic institutions in developing nations. Democrats argued that the Republican administration’s animus toward foreign aid programmes would hurt America’s standing in the world and create a vacuum for China to fill.
The White House argued that many of the cuts would incentivise other nations to step up and do more to respond to humanitarian crises and that the rescissions best served the American taxpayer. “The money that we’re clawing back in this rescissions package is the people’s money. We ought not to forget that,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., chair of the House Rules Committee. Democrats say the bill upends a legislative process that typically requires lawmakers from both parties to work together to fund the nation’s priorities.
