The Senate voted Tuesday to advance President Donald Trump’s request to claw back $9 billion in foreign aid and federal funding for public broadcasting despite the misgivings of some Republicans.
Senators must now consider a series of other procedural hurdles and up to 10 hours of debate before a final floor vote; if that succeeds, the legislation would have to return to the House to be considered before Friday’s deadline.
The rescissions bill is a top priority for the Trump administration, which plans to use the same process to seek deeper cuts in the future if it passes. But some Senate Republicans balked at the cuts, leading Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) to strip some of them from the bill Tuesday to secure the votes to advance it.
Senate Republicans said they would remove $400 million in cuts to the HIV/AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR from the $9.4 billion package. Russell Vought, the White House budget director, said Republicans had the votes to pass the bill after lunching Tuesday with Republican senators.
But those changes were not enough for Collins, Murkowski and McConnell.
Murkowski faulted the administration for failing to provide enough detail about which programs would be cut and decried the bill’s cuts to public broadcasting. But she said her concerns run much deeper than what’s in the bill.
“We’re lawmakers. We should be legislating,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote. “What we’re getting now is a direction from the White House and being told, ‘This is the priority. We want you to execute on it. We’ll be back with you with another round.’ I don’t accept that.”
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), who voted for the bill, echoed Murkowski’s concerns that the administration did not provide enough specifics and said he did not fault Republican senators who voted against the bill.
Some Republicans “are very concerned, as I am, about this process and who are requesting of the administration, if we do this again, please give us specific information about where the cuts will come,” Wicker, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on the Senate floor before the vote. “Let’s not make a habit of this. Let’s not consider this a precedent.”
Tuesday’s vote was a first step toward passing the bill. The Senate must vote to start debate on the bill, followed by hours of debate and votes on amendments.
Lawmakers are under pressure because Congress must approve the cuts by Friday at midnight under the law they are using to dodge a Democratic filibuster.
The bill would achieve only a tiny fraction of the $1 trillion in yearly savings that Elon Musk pledged to find in the federal budget during his months as a top adviser to President Donald Trump. Still, Republicans see it as a first step toward pursuing deeper cuts — and as way to defund programs some of them view as a waste of money.
“While the actual American people are working long hours to afford groceries and gas, their government has been writing checks to left-wing propaganda outlets and spending billions overseas on countries that hate us,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri), the bill’s lead sponsor, said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.
Democrats have warned that the cuts would devastate public TV and radio stations, and gut lifesaving foreign aid programs. No Democrats are expected to support the bill — but Republicans don’t need their votes.
The Trump administration asked Congress to approve the cuts through the rescissions process, which allows the Senate to rescind previously approved spending with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a likely Democratic filibuster. The administration is allowed to withhold the funding in the meantime under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
The catch: Congress must send the bill to Trump’s desk by Friday or the administration will be forced to release the funds. Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, meaning they can lose up to three Republican votes and pass the bill. The House — which approved the package last month — will need to vote on it again if the Senate changes it.
If the bill passes, it would be the first rescissions package that Congress has passed at a president’s request in decades. Trump’s previous effort to pass such a package failed in 2018 when Sens. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) — who left the Senate in 2023 — and Collins voted “no” on a procedural vote.
Republicans have described the cuts as a first step — albeit a small one — toward cutting spending. “What we’re talking about here is one-tenth of 1 percent of all federal spending,” Thune told reporters Tuesday.
Democrats have countered that the savings included in the bill would be a drop in the bucket compared with the cost of the tax and spending bill Republicans passed this month, which the Congressional Budget Office has estimated would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit. “They claim we don’t have the money for it?” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) told reporters, referring to foreign aid and funding for public radio and TV stations. “We say bull. What about the tax cuts for the wealthy? They had the money for that.”
Democrats have cautioned that if Republicans cut spending that both parties have agreed to, it will make it much harder to strike a deal to fund the government in September, since Republicans could later rescind Democrats’ priorities unilaterally.
“How are we supposed to negotiate a bipartisan deal if Republicans turn around and put it through the shredder in a partisan vote?” Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said last week on the Senate floor.
At least one Senate Republican has expressed sympathy for Murray’s view.
“I don’t like rescissions,” Murkowski, a senior Appropriations Committee member, said last week during a committee meeting. “I don’t like the rescission package that we’re going to be dealing with. I don’t like the whole exercise of rescissions — particularly at a time when we’re actually trying to advance appropriations.”
Murkowski and Collins also expressed concern about $1.1 billion in cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS.
Federal funding makes up about 15 percent of PBS’s budget and 1 percent of NPR’s budget, but member stations are more vulnerable. The cuts could shutter some small radio stations, which are sometimes the only way of getting out emergency messages in rural areas.
Another Republican who was worried about the cuts, Sen. Mike Rounds (South Dakota), said Tuesday that he would vote for the package after the White House agreed to transfer millions of dollars to the Interior Department for tribal radio stations.
“It’s not a huge sum of money compared to the rest of the rescissions package, but for me it was very important because these radio stations would not survive without that funding,” Rounds told reporters.
The package also includes billions of dollars in cuts to other foreign aid programs, including funding for refugees, democracy promotion and the United Nations. Vought has described some of the spending the administration is seeking to cut as “almost comically wasteful,” such as funding for electric buses in Rwanda and wind farms in Ukraine.
Trump has already made deep cuts to federal agencies without seeking congressional approval, triggering a torrent of lawsuits. The administration in March effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administered much of the foreign aid that it months later asked Congress to rescind.
But the administration has also fired thousands of workers at agencies that it did not ask Congress to slash as part of the rescissions package, such as the Education Department. The Supreme Court allowed the administration Monday to cut more than a third of the agency’s workers and shift some of its functions to states and other agencies, at least temporarily.
Trump has in particular warned Republicans not to strip out the cuts to public broadcasting.
“Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement,” Trump wroteon Truth Social last week.
Scott Nover contributed to this report.