CNN
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President Donald Trump is one step closer to having Congress officially sign off on a slice of his Department of Government Efficiency’s spending cuts after Senate Republicans agreed in the early hours of Thursday morning to cancel $9 billion in funding to foreign aid and public broadcasting.
The package now returns to the House for final approval, where it must pass by a Friday deadline mandated under the budget rules Republicans are using to move the package without Democratic votes. If successful, it will then head to Trump’s desk, where he’s expected to sign the partisan push to claw back federal dollars that Congress had already sent out the door.
While most Senate Republicans firmly embraced the spending cuts and are pressing for more, some within the party raised concerns over the White House push, arguing that it set a harmful precedent undermining congressional authority. Two Republicans opposed the measure on the final vote: Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The final tally was 51-48.
Roughly $8 billion will be taken from congressionally approved foreign aid programs as part of the White House’s efforts to dismantle the US Agency for International Development. Another $1.1 billion comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund NPR and PBS.
The Senate passed the bill after an extended voting session on amendments that stretched from Wednesday afternoon into the early hours of Thursday morning and lasted over 12 and a half hours. Democrats offered a number of amendments attempting to strike provisions from the legislation, but none were adopted.
Trump and his team have spent weeks working to convince Republicans to support their plan. Officials were forced to make at least one major concession ahead of the final Senate vote, bowing to a demand from multiple GOP senators to spare funding for PEPFAR, the Bush-era program to fight global AIDS.
Now the pressure is on House Republicans to adopt the spending cuts before Friday’s deadline. The House initially passed the package in June, but must take it up again because the Senate made changes to the bill. Just before the Senate’s final vote, the chamber voted to adopt what’s known as a substitute amendment – an amendment that Republicans used to make tweaks to the House version of the bill.
If the House passes the new version of the legislation, as expected, it will mark the second time this month that it will have had to accept changes made by the Senate ahead of a looming deadline, after the chamber narrowly adopted the Senate’s version of the president’s sweeping domestic policy agenda bill before July 4.
Before the Senate held its final vote, Speaker Mike Johnson encouraged the Senate to send the package back to his chamber “as is” due to the House Republicans’ narrow majority. But the Louisiana Republican added, “We’re going to process whatever they send us, whenever they send us.”
As Republicans worked to win over holdouts, Sen. Mike Rounds announced earlier this week that he would back the package after working out an agreement that would keep funds flowing to rural radio stations in his state of South Dakota, an issue he had been working for weeks to resolve.
Rounds said of his negotiations on X: “We wanted to make sure tribal broadcast services in South Dakota continued to operate which provide potentially lifesaving emergency alerts,” and said that he worked with the Trump administration to find “money that could be reallocated to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption.”
As Republicans geared up to advance the bill on Tuesday in a series of procedural votes, GOP leaders unveiled a key change by dropping a controversial cut of $400 million that senators believed would impact the AIDs relief program PEPFAR. The program has been popular among many senators and is seen as a key tool in helping the US combat the AIDs epidemic around the world.
Vice President JD Vance cast tie-breaking votes for the bill to clear the procedural hurdles.
But the changes were not enough for Collins and Murkowski, who both argued that the administration failed to provide enough specifics on how cuts would be implemented and raised concerns over the potential for adverse consequences.
Former Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell voted with Collins and Murkowski against Tuesday’s procedural votes to advance the bill, but the Kentucky Republican ultimately voted in favor of the final bill.
After voting against advancing the package on Tuesday night, Collins said, “The rescissions package has a big problem – nobody really knows what program reductions are in it. That isn’t because we haven’t had time to review the bill. Instead, the problem is that (the White House Office of Management and Budget) has never provided the details that would normally be part of this process.”
Murkowski agreed that the administration had not been provided enough specifics, insisted on the necessity of protecting public broadcasting and warned that accepting the White House package undermines Congress’s constitutional control over government funding.
In a floor speech ahead of the procedural votes on Tuesday on advancing the package, she said, “We’re lawmakers. We should be legislating. What we’re getting now is a direction from the White House and being told, ‘This is the priority. We want you to execute on it. We’ll be back with you with another round.’ I don’t accept that.”
CNN’s Lauren Fox contributed to this report.
