President Donald Trump will send legislation to Congress asking for nearly $10 billion in spending cuts, the White House has confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
An official said the rescissions package, which rescinds previously approved funding, will be sent to Capitol Hill when Congress returns from its Easter recess on April 28. The bill totals $9.3 billion and would be cut mostly from the budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the United States Agency for International Development.
A rescissions package can pass with a simple majority, meaning it would only need 50 votes in the Senate rather than the 60 required to overcome a filibuster.
A few smaller agencies, such as the U.S. Institute of Peace, would also be affected. The New York Post was the first to report the news.
Since Trump took office, he and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have cut billions from the federal budget, sending thousands of federal employees home via layoffs and buyout packages. However, those cuts remain in limbo unless Congress formalizes them due to legislation like the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
The Trump administration has now begun that process. A White House official sent a list of justifications for the cuts, saying that multiple Public Broadcasting Service programs feature transgender characters and pointing out that National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher called Trump a “fascist” and a “deranged racist” — though she walked those statements back after he won a second term.
The White House also opposes an NPR tool called Dex, which tracks sources by race and gender, saying it was used to fill “de facto quotas,” and to PBS’s “LGBT+toolkit,” which the White House says advocated men playing in women’s sports. Trump issued a sweeping anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive order on his first day in office and has worked to gut the initiatives across the federal government.
Similarly, in justifying the USAID cuts, the White House says the agency spent $900,000 building a greenhouse gas calculator, $500,000 to buy electric busses in Rwanda, $4 million for legume systems research, $6 million for “Net Zero Cities” in Mexico, $3 million for an Iraqi version of Sesame Street, and $4 million for “sedentary migrants” in Colombia.
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The Trump administration deems all of those uses unnecessary and has listed out expenditures that it thinks most voters will oppose.
Conservatives have long targeted public broadcasting for spending cuts, seeing it as a bastion of left-wing thinking that is sent over the airwaves on the taxpayer’s dime. Foreign aid, meanwhile, historically enjoys low support in polling.
