Less than 48 hours before a hard deadline, Senate Republicans passed a rescission bill early Thursday morning codifying roughly $9 billion in Department of Government Efficiency cuts.
In a 51-48 vote, two Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — joined all voting Democrats in opposing the rescission package, after senators amended the legislation to remove certain cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program. (Democratic Sen. Tina Smith missed the vote due to a hospital stay.)
The decision to amend the legislation, in this case, is significant. It means the bill will have to go back to the House and pass there, once again, with just hours to spare before a midnight deadline on Friday.
(Rescission bills have certain rules, which allows the Senate to pass the legislation with a simple majority, but there is also a 45-day timeline to get the measure passed in both chambers and signed by the president. If the bill is not completed by then, on July 18, the money legally has to be spent, as Congress previously directed.)
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune insisted the bill was an opportunity to “do something meaningful when it comes to reducing the size and scope of the federal government, and particularly in areas of our government where we know there is waste, fraud and abuse.”
But even the senators most alarmed about the cuts noted that a $9 billion reduction isn’t much in the grand scheme of nearly $7 trillion in yearly government spending.
As Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen put it on Wednesday, the $9 billion cut represents about 0.23% of “the debt that Republican senators voted to increase just two weeks ago” in their reconciliation bill.
“So we explode the debt by $4 trillion two weeks ago,” Van Hollen said, referring to the reconciliation legislation’s price tag over 10 years. “And this week, we’re coming after Big Bird.”
The rescission bill would roll back spending on foreign aid and public broadcasting programs — two areas that have been heavily targeted during President Donald Trump’s second-term — with the majority of the cuts coming out of international aid programs like the U.S. Agency for International Development.
While the legislation makes it difficult to see how much is cut from individual programs — a complaint that Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins used to justify her opposition to it — most lawmakers are under the assumption that about $7.4 billion of the cuts would come from international aid. Approximately another $1 billion is supposed to come from those public broadcasting cuts, though Sen. Mike Rounds extracted promises to repurpose some Green New Deal funds to pay for tribal radio stations across the country.
Getting the bill to this point has been no small feat. In the House, Republican leaders barely passed the legislation after twisting arms and making their own side deals on the House floor.
In the Senate, it was perhaps even tougher.
Thune was only able to advance the package after he agreed to amend the bill and remove the PEPFAR cuts. The HIV-AIDS prevention program passed into law in 2003, and multiple senators still in office voted to create PEPFAR while serving in Congress. Several said they couldn’t support gutting the program, which was a signature achievement of President George W. Bush.
But amending the legislation means Speaker Mike Johnson has more work to do. The bill now heads back to the House, where it will have to pass before that midnight deadline on Friday.
Democrats have said they may try to slow the process and see if it’s possible to delay the package past the point of it dying Friday night. But Democrats also believe they may not have enough dilatory tools available to stop it — not if Republicans are actually determined to get the bill passed.
Democrats did try to delay passage through a prolonged series of amendment votes Wednesday. But the rules on amendments for a rescission package are strict, and Democrats were limited to offering proposals that were strictly focused on subject matter already in the bill.
The vote-a-rama began around 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday and ended at just after 2 a.m. on Thursday, after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would try to use the amendment process to “show the American people exactly what Republicans are doing.”
“We will highlight through amendments the devastating cuts to local television and radio stations across the country, as well the damage these cuts will do to America’s standing as a world leader,” Schumer said Wednesday.
In the end, all Democratic amendments were rejected; Thune’s proposal to strip the PEPFAR cuts was adopted.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has made a show of slashing government spending through the Department of Government Efficiency. But this government funding was already appropriated before Trump came into office, and cutting it in an official capacity requires congressional approval.
The House will try to pass the amended bill on Thursday, though that timeline could slip if Democrats can hold up the measure. Every minute could count, particularly Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ “magic minute,” which allows a party leader to speak for however long they want while the party is only charged for one minute of debate time.
Jeffries used his “magic minute” two weeks ago during the reconciliation debate to break a record for the longest House floor speech. If the House delays consideration too much, Jeffries could singlehandedly derail the bill by taking over the floor and not yielding it back until after the deadline.
It’s a possibility Republicans are keenly aware of and looking to avoid by moving quickly on the final rescission vote. But the House has its own to-do list before tackling the rescission package.
Republicans are trying to pass a slate of cryptocurrency bills and work through a defense spending bill on Thursday. They then would have to adopt a rule setting up floor consideration for the rescission bill, debate the bill and pass it. It all could be a trying process consuming the one thing Republicans don’t have: time.