For months, DOGE has been cutting federal spending without consulting Congress. Now, the White House is asking lawmakers to vote to make some of those cuts permanent.
President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget sent a $9.4 billion “rescission package” to Congress on Tuesday that would claw back federal funding that lawmakers have previously approved.
The package includes $8.3 billion in foreign aid cuts and nearly $1.1 billion in cuts to public broadcasting.
That’s less than half of one percent of the $2 trillion in federal spending cuts once floated by Elon Musk, who until recently was the de facto DOGE leader. And these cuts are seen as low-hanging fruit.
This could be the first of several bills sent to Congress to codify DOGE cuts into law.
“We look forward to working with the Congress to identify additional opportunities to put the Nation’s fiscal house back in order,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought wrote in a letter accompanying the request.
Here’s what the Trump administration is trying to cut
The administration is asking Congress to cut a total of $9.4 billion.
$1.07 billion of that is funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a government-backed entity that funds NPR and PBS. That’s equivalent to two years of funding.
The other $8.3 billion includes various forms of foreign aid: $6.3 billion of that funding is related to the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, the foreign aid agency that DOGE shuttered in the early months of the administration.
That includes $2.5 billion in development assistance, $1.65 billion in economic support funds, and $900 billion for global health programs.
The White House has also requested that Congress rescind $1.13 billion in contributions to various international organizations, including $800 billion for migration and refugee assistance, and a combined $64 million for organizations like the Inter-American Foundation, the African Development Foundation, at the United States Institute of Peace.
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There’s a limited amount of time to get this done
Under the Impoundment Control Act, or ICA, the president is generally required to spend money that Congress has already approved. The law was passed in 1974, after President Richard Nixon refused to spend money on a variety of programs that he disagreed with.
Trump and his allies have argued that this law is unconstitutional, and some Republicans in Congress have introduced a bill to eliminate it entirely.
The administration has also withheld hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding already, and the Government Accountability Office has found that the administration is violating the ICA.
But the ICA also provides for the president to make rescission requests to Congress, and the Trump administration is now using that tool.
Under the law, Congress has 45 days of consecutive session to approve the cuts, or the money must be spent. That means lawmakers have until early September to get this done.
Unlike other bills, rescission bills only require a simple majority in the Senate to pass. That means Democrats, who are expected to broadly oppose the legislation, have no way of blocking the cuts on their own.
That doesn’t mean GOP support will be unanimous. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, recently wrote an op-ed in a local paper opposing cuts to public broadcasting funding.
The last time a president tried to do this, it failed. In 2018, the Trump administration asked Congress to rescind $15 billion in federal spending, but the bill failed to pass the Senate.
Here’s the full text of the White House’s rescission request:
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/25960446-proposed-rescissions-of-budgetary-resources/?embed=1