House GOP Faces Deadline to Cut Foreign Aid, Public Broadcasting

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is expected to vote as soon as Thursday on President Donald Trump's $9 billion funding cut to public media and to foreign aid, after the Senate approved the package.

House Republicans were poised to vote in favor of the funding cut package, altered by the Senate this week to exclude cuts of about $400 million in funds for an HIV/AIDS prevention program.

The vote was expected for Thursday evening but is creeping toward a Friday timeline due to a recent logjam on the floor as Republican House members have disagreed about other legislation.

If the chamber is able to bring the funding cut package to the floor -- barring other delays from Republicans or Democrats -- the final tally could be close. In June, four Republicans joined Democrats to vote against the package, which passed 214-212.

House Republicans are feeling extra pressure now, as Trump's administration would be forced to spend the money if Congress does not approve the cuts by Friday.

"Democrats are going to continue to fight hard and do everything we can to make sure that we are pushing back aggressively on this rescissions package that is going to hurt the American people," Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters.

He said he might take up floor time with a longer-than-normal speech, which is allowed.

The $9 billion at stake amounts to roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of the $6.8 trillion federal budget. Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune argued it is a "small, but important step toward fiscal sanity."

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 and skew to the left in programming.

In the 51-48 Senate vote, only two Republicans, Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, voted against the funding cut. Both questioned why the legislative body -- constitutionally responsible for the power of the purse -- was taking direction from the executive branch to slash funding through the so-called rescissions package.

"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 Democrats this week warned that this one-party cut could damage the necessary bipartisanship to pass funding bills.

"Republicans embrace the credo of cut, cut, cut now, and ask questions later," said Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

This week's potential 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.

Democrat lawmakers also accuse the administration of blocking more than $425 billion so far this year.

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 Democrat 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, chair of the Senate appropriations committee, said as her committee debated government funding for next the fiscal year.

These funding bills require bipartisan support to reach the necessary 60-vote threshold for government funding legislation, unlike the funding cut package that only requires a simple majority support in both congressional chambers.