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President Donald Trump signed into law his roughly $9 billion rescissions package to scale back already approved federal funds for foreign aid and public broadcasting Thursday, after both chambers of Congress approved the legislation earlier in the month, sources familiar to the matter have confirmed.
The signing marks another legislative victory for the Trump administration just two weeks after the president signed into law his massive tax and domestic policy measure, dubbed the “big, beautiful bill.”
The rescissions package pulls back nearly $8 billion in funding Congress already approved for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a previously independent agency that provided impoverished countries aid and offered development assistance.
However, USAID has faced layoffs and has been absorbed into the State Department amid concerns from the Trump administration that the organization did not advance U.S. core interests.
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The rescissions package also pulls more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that provides federal funding for NPR and PBS.
The total $9 billion cut is a fraction of a percent of the entire national debt, which currently sits at about $36.7 trillion as of Wednesday.
The House previously approved its version of the rescissions package in June, and voted on the final version of the measure early Friday after the Senate narrowly approved the measure by a 51–48 margin early on the morning od July 17. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted alongside Democrats to oppose the package.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that the measure aligned with other priorities to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government and is a step in the right direction.
“I appreciate all the work the administration has done in identifying wasteful spending,” Thune said in a speech ahead of the vote. “And now it’s time for the Senate to do its part to cut some of that waste out of the budget. It’s a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue.”
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Meanwhile, Democrats have said that the cuts to foreign aid are a win for China and Russia, and that the package puts national security at risk. Additionally, Democrats argue Republicans’ employment of rescissions sets a dangerous precedent that could jeopardize a host of programs down the line.
“If Republicans slash more American aid, it will create a dangerous vacuum that the Chinese Communist Party will continue to eagerly fill,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said July 15 on the Senate floor.
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“They are using pocket rescissions to poison the bipartisan appropriations process, to break the law to steal funds that Congress appropriated, and they’re doing it at a party-line vote,” Schumer said. “Worse, they’re letting Donald Trump decide for himself which programs to defund, and that puts everything at risk – healthcare, education, food assistance, public health. Everything – everything – becomes at risk. That is what happens if a package like this is allowed to become law.”
Although Trump previously attempted to advance a rescissions package in 2018 that also targeted foreign aid and public broadcasting funds during his first term, it failed to gain support in the Senate after Collins and then-Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., voted against it.
The last time Congress approved a rescissions package was in 1999.
Fox News’ Alex Miller contributed to this report.
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