WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives was struggling on Thursday to advance President Donald Trump’s proposed $9 billion funding cut to public media and to foreign aid, amid infighting among the Republican majority over issues, including questions related to Jeffrey Epstein.
House Republicans were poised to vote as soon as Thursday on the funding cut package, altered by the Senate this week to exclude cuts of about $400 million in funds for an HIV/AIDS prevention program.
A late-developing complication with this bill was some Republicans’ demands to add an amendment calling for more transparency into the investigation of the deceased financier and convicted sex offender Epstein.
For the last week, conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein and his associates have surrounded Trump’s White House after some high-profile supporters of the president, including congressional leaders, called for more information on Epstein from the Justice Department than was previously released.
“The way the Republican leadership is running this place is astonishingly bad; the incompetence is stunning,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee.
“I look forward to an honest, not a political debate, on the issue of the Epstein file,” Rep. Austin Scott, a Georgia Republican on the rules panel, said in response, adding that Republicans feel a “responsibility” to protect the Epstein victims.
It is unclear if an Epstein-related amendment will make its way into the procedural rule to consider the funding cut.
House Republicans are feeling extra pressure now, as Trump’s administration would be forced to spend the money if Congress does not approve the cuts by Friday, due to the law’s 45-day consideration window closing.
If the chamber is able to advance the funding cut package, barring other delays from Republicans or Democrats, the final tally could be close. In June, four Republicans joined Democrats to vote against the package, which passed 214-212.
“Democrats are going to continue to fight hard and do everything we can to make sure that we are pushing back aggressively on this rescissions package that is going to hurt the American people,” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters. He said he might take up floor time with a longer-than-normal speech, which is allowed.
The $9 billion at stake amounts to roughly one-tenth of 1% of the $6.8 trillion federal budget.
Republicans say the foreign aid funds previously went to programs they deem wasteful, and they say the $1 billion in public media funding supports radio stations and PBS television that are biased against conservative viewpoints.
I look forward to an honest, not a political debate, on the issue of the Epstein file.
–Rep. Austin Scott, Georgia Republican
Debating the power of the purse
In the 51-48 Senate vote, only two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins, from Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, from Alaska, voted against the funding cut. Both questioned why the legislative body, constitutionally responsible for the power of the purse, was taking direction from the executive branch to slash funding through the so-called rescissions package.
“There’s a good reason I think that we haven’t seen a successful rescissions package before the Senate in almost 33 years,” Murkowski said in a Senate floor speech this week, “It’s because we’ve recognized that, ‘hey, that’s our role here.'”
Funding cuts are regularly approved with bipartisan support in Congress through the appropriations process.
But Democratic leaders this week warned this one-party cut could damage the necessary bipartisanship to pass funding bills.
This week’s potential funding clawback represents only a tiny portion of all the funds approved by Congress that the Trump administration has held up while it has pursued sweeping cuts.
Democratic lawmakers also accuse the administration of blocking more than $425 billion so far this year.
After the measure cleared the Senate, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said more such spending-cut requests are “likely” to be made by the Trump administration.
Murkowski, Collins, and some Democratic appropriators also condemned a Thursday comment Vought made to reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, where he said the “appropriations process has to be less bipartisan.”
“The best way for us to counter what has been said by the (Office of Management and Budget) director is to continue to work in a bipartisan way,” Collins, chairwoman of the Senate appropriations committee, said as her committee debated government funding for next the fiscal year.
These funding bills require bipartisan support to reach the necessary 60-vote threshold for government funding legislation, unlike the funding cut package that only requires a simple majority support in both congressional chambers.
Contributing: Richard Cowan, David Morgan, Ryan Patrick Jones
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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