House Committee Advances $9.4 Billion Rescissions Package, Teeing Up Floor Vote

The spending cuts, submitted to Congress by the White House on June 3, would primarily affect U.S. foreign aid and federally funded media.

The U.S. Capitol in Washington on May 22, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The House Rules Committee on June 10 advanced a package of $9.4 billion in rescissions requested by President Donald Trump, setting up a floor vote on the issue this week.

The spending cuts, submitted to Congress by the White House on June 3, would primarily affect U.S. foreign aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and federally funded media. The rules panel approved the package in a party-line 8 to 4 vote.

The bulk of the proposed cuts, approximately $8.3 billion, come out of USAID’s budget, affecting programs across the world deemed by the administration to be wasteful or not aligned with U.S. national interests, as part of overall efforts to reduce federal outlays.

The other $1.1 billion would come from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Republicans were supportive of the cuts, describing them as “modest.”

Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said the process to approve these cuts was being carried out in a “textbook” way, under the Impoundment Control Act, which circumscribes the president’s ability to withdraw federal funds without congressional approval.

“President Trump and congressional Republicans campaigned on attacking wasteful spending,” Foxx said. “So the new administration ... then found wasteful spending. President Trump then acted and recommended that these funds be permanently canceled. I cannot think of a more textbook scenario of the proper utilization of this process.

Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), meanwhile, said that the cuts aren’t “waste or fraud or abuse. It’s gutting essential services that people rely on, getting programs that save lives.”

Democrats particularly mentioned the bill’s $400 million in cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a federal initiative handled by USAID which seeks to combat HIV and AIDS globally.

“This program alone has saved 26 million people from dying of HIV, and enabled more than 8 million babies to be born HIV-free,” McGovern said. “There are now tens of millions of people on lifesaving treatment with PEPFAR accounting for over 90 percent of preventative treatments around the world. Your bill pulls the rug from under this program and caps 20 years of virus progress.”

At $1.1 billion, the requested funding cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—whose budget sat at $535 million in 2024—would strip most or all of the federal government’s support from these outlets for two years, and could send them scrambling to secure outside funding if Congress approves the cuts.

However, most of the proposed cuts would affect USAID and its foreign aid initiatives.

About $2.24 million of the cuts would affect programs intended to promote LGBT programs in the Caribbean, the Western Balkans, Uganda, and elsewhere.

Several environmental policy items are also included: $5 million for “green transportation and logistics,” $500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda, $6 million for ”Net Zero Cities“ in Mexico, $2.5 million to teach young children how to make environmentally friendly “reproductive health” decisions, and $614,700 for climate adaptations such as growing coral reefs in the Caribbean.

Several other six-figure budget items are also included: $1 million for voter ID in Haiti, $4 million for “legume systems research,” $3 million for Iraqi Sesame Street, $4 million for “sedentary migrants” in Colombia, $6 million for supporting the media organizations and civic life of Palestinians, and $1.2 million for the “Afrobarometer public opinion survey.”