Senate sends $9 billion rescissions package to the House

WASHINGTON — The Senate early Thursday narrowly passed, 51-48, a $9 billion foreign aid and public media rescissions package, sending the spending cancellations sought by President Donald Trump back to the House where the clock is ticking to get it cleared by Friday.

GOP moderates Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska broke ranks to back the final measure. The House is expected to take up the amended legislation later on Thursday.

Senators ended a 13-hour vote-a-rama after adopting, 52-47, a Republican substitute that stripped out a $400 million rescission to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a popular anti-HIV program, and barred any remaining rescissions from taking away funding for agriculture and nutrition assistance and some country-specific grants, including to Jordan and Egypt.

Kentucky Republican Rand Paul was the lone Republican to oppose the substitute, which the Senate took nearly two dozen votes on.

Attention now moves to the House where intra-Republican feuding on Wednesday temporarily delayed adoption of a rule to allow for same-day votes on the rescissions package. But leaders reached a deal late in the evening on unrelated crypto legislation that cleared a path for the rescissions measure, which must be passed by Congress by midnight Friday under a process set out by a 1974 budget law.

Failure to meet that timeline would mean the modified package, which includes $7.9 billion in foreign aid cuts and $1.1 billion in canceled spending for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, must be unfrozen by the White House and spent as originally directed by Congress.

In the Senate, one of the Democratic amendments that drew the highest GOP votes — but was still defeated 49-50 — was a proposal by Chris Coons of Delaware that would have deleted a rescission of $496 million to the international disaster assistance account. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Collins and Murkowski crossed party lines to back the amendment.

But Senate Democrats were left with one fewer vote after Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith was hospitalized on Wednesday due to feeling unwell while she was working at the Capitol.

Collins and Murkowski also backed several other Democratic proposals aimed at watering down the bill, including one from Tim Kaine of Virginia that would direct that contracts for faith-based organizations not be impacted by rescissions to the International Development and Migration and Refugee Assistance accounts. Kaine’s amendment was rejected 48-51.

The pair also voted in favor of a motion to recommit the bill with the goal of striking rescissions that would reduce children’s access to public television educational programs. The motion, offered by Massachusetts Democrat Edward J. Markey, was defeated 47-50. In an unusual move, Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly offered a substitute amendment authored by Collins that she had decided not to offer. The amendment would pare back numerous rescissions throughout the package. Senators agreed to kill the proposal, 51-47.

The passage vote marked a victory for the Trump administration, which is seeking to use the rescissions process to pare back federal spending and codify cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. But Democrats warned their GOP colleagues of long-term harm to the chamber’s appropriations process, where a 60-vote threshold means bipartisan support is required to advance spending bills.

“We have never, never before seen bipartisan investments, slashed through a partisan rescissions package. Do not start now,” Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a floor speech Wednesday. “Not when we are working, at this very moment, in a bipartisan way to pass our spending bills.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., acknowledged the argument put forth by Democrats that the annual appropriations process would be damaged if a precedent is set that spending agreements could be canceled whenever one party has unified control of the White House and Congress.

“If I’m a Democrat and you’re trying to get me to vote and get to a 60-vote threshold to fund the government and you’ve just betrayed a prior agreement and a prior appropriation, what is the likelihood that they will do that,” Tillis said in a floor speech.

Tillis also warned he could withhold his support from future rescissions packages if the White House reneged on assurances given to him that non-military assistance to Ukraine would be spared in the foreign aid rescissions.

Democrats are also promising more arduous vote-a-ramas if White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and Trump send additional rescissions packages to Congress, which will further eat into the Senate’s limited floor time.

Already this year there have been vote-a-ramas on the GOP budget resolution which spanned six hours with 21 votes in April, and a marathon vote-a-rama less than a month ago on the Republican reconciliation measure, that lasted for 27 hours.

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—Victor Feldman contributed to this report.