GOP Leadership Not Worried About Forcing Members To Go On Record On Worst Of DOGE

Yahoo

3 days ago

The White House finally sent over a rescissions package request — a move the administration has been dragging its feet on for months — asking Republicans in Congress to swallow a chunk of the sweeping cuts that Elon Musk has enacted with his DOGE destruction so far this year.
While the request only includes a portion of the congressionally authorized federal funding that the Trump administration has lawlessly rescinded or frozen since Trump was sworn back into the White House, it includes some of the most damaging foreign aid cuts of the last few months. It conveniently does not include the most unpopular-at-home cuts to things like medical research, which has caused even some of the most ardently MAGA Republicans in Congress to shudder due to the toll they could take on institutions that employ many voters back home.
And, so, Republican leadership is not at all concerned, apparently, with forcing members of their conference to choke down these efforts to gut foreign aid, reproductive rights resources abroad, and publicly funded media before midterms campaigning kicks into gear. We're expecting to hear some unease from Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) about the constitutionally backward demand from the Trump administration. Both Republican senators also tend to oppose attacks on women's health care, at least publicly.
But in order to pass, the rescissions package only requires simple majority support in the House and the Senate, meaning Republican leadership won't need Collins' or Murkowski's votes to shove the whole thing through. If any other vulnerable House or Senate Republicans take issue with rescinding the $9.4 billion in federal spending that they appropriated, they've not yet vocalized those concerns.
Among the cuts to foreign aid programs covered by the package are cuts specifically to those programs designed to support LGBTQ communities. It also includes cuts to federal education and transportation funds, reproductive health care programs and funding for the World Health Organization. It includes $142 million in cuts to UNICEF, $9 million in cuts to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and guts $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's budget.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has already vowed to soon take action on the package. House Speaker Mike Johnson promised the same, applauding the White House for stripping federal funding from NPR and PBS, a pipe dream Republicans in Congress have been salivating over for decades. Here's House Republican leadership's statement:
'Today, the House has officially received the rescissions request from the White House to eliminate $9.4 billion in wasteful foreign aid spending at the State Department and USAID and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS.
'Now that this wasteful spending by the federal government has been identified by DOGE, quantified by the Administration, and sent to Congress, House Republicans will fulfill our mandate and continue codifying into law a more efficient federal government. This is exactly what the American people deserve.
'Next week, we will put the rescissions bill on the floor of the House and encourage all our Members to support this commonsense measure.'
Regardless of how this all might come back to bite them in the midterms, the embrace of the rescissions package before its brought to a vote is illustrative of Republican leadership's eagerness to strip the legislative branch of its own authority during Trump II — by lending an air of legitimacy to what was, originally, an illegitimate and likely in many ways illegal process.
Even after the Ivy League school bent the knee on a litany of other demands from the Trump administration, the Department of Education is now attacking Columbia University's accreditation. Arguing the school is violating federal anti-discrimination laws (because students in support of Palestinians have continued to speak about their beliefs and protest on campus), Education Secretary Linda McMahon urged the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredits Columbia, to 'take appropriate action' against the school.
McMahon also claimed that 'Columbia University's leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus,' despite the fact that, at the Trump administration's demand, it has cracked down on speech that draws attention to the plight of the Palestinian people, and is even considering curriculum changes.
A new estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts House Republicans' reconciliation package would grow the federal deficit by $2.4 trillion over a decade.
House Republican leadership almost immediately pushed back on the CBO's estimate. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) slammed the CBO report at a press conference Wednesday morning.
'I get that we got to play by the rules of the referee, but the referee's been wrong. We've got a referee that tries to sack our quarterback a lot,' Scalise said.
The White House also pushed back against the impending assessment before the CBO even released its finding today, defending the bill and accusing CBO of being 'lefty.'
Republicans tend to only criticize the legitimacy of the nonpartisan CBO when it's their own party's legislation getting assessed. Despite the downplaying, the score might still impact the Senate's decision making as Senate Republicans are now working on making changes to the bill.
Several Senate Republicans have already indicated they think the bill adds too much to the deficit.
'I refuse to accept $2 trillion-plus deficits as far as the eye can see as the new normal. We have to address that problem, and unfortunately this bill doesn't do so,' Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said during an ABC News interview following the CBO release.
Johnson added regardless of individual CBO scores, the trajectory of deficits and debt is 'hard to dispute.'
— Emine Yücel
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