Politics
NEW: House Votes To Defund NPR, PBS
The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday voted to codify President Donald Trump’s $9.4 billion spending cuts package, which includes long-promised cuts to NPR and PBS.
The package passed in a final vote of 214-212, which broke down mostly along party lines. Four House Republicans, including Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Mike Turner (R-OH) and Mark Amodei (R-NV), voted against the cuts.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) notably voted in the affirmative after previously voting against moving the package out of committee.
The bill appeared destined to fail at one point during Thursday’s vote, as six Republicans had voted “no” as ballots were still being tallied. At that point, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) huddled with several moderate Republicans who had already voted “no” or had not yet voted, Fox News reported.
Following the meeting, House leadership managed to convince two holdouts, Reps. Don Bacon (R-NE) and Nick Lakota (R-NY) to change their votes.
Spending cuts in the legislation include a $8.3 billion rollback of funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and just over $1 billion in cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates taxpayer funding to NPR and PBS.
In addition to the spending cuts, House GOP leaders included a provision that will make minor changes to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” in order to account for the Senate needing to amend the legislation, Fox News reported. The latter bill, which will provide billions of dollars in additional funding for border security and make the president’s 2017 tax cuts permanent, is currently going through the budget reconciliation process.
By dropping the threshold to pass the bill in the Senate from 60 to 51, Republicans will be able to pass the vast piece of legislation without Democrat support provided they adhere to a specific set of budgetary rules.
House GOP leaders said they needed to make the recent changes to the bill to better adhere to the Senate’s “Byrd Bath,” when the Senate parliamentarian reviews the bill and removes anything not adhering to reconciliation guidelines,” Fox News reported.
While much of the Big Beautiful Bill deals with mandatory spending, the $9.4 billion spending cuts package deals with discretionary spending that is set by Congress every year. It is what is known as a “rescissions package,” which is a formal proposal by the White House to claw back federal funds already allocated for the current fiscal year.
