News: House GOP leaders tentatively plan to vote on President Donald Trump’s package to claw back billions of dollars in federal funding already approved by Congress during the week of May 5, according to multiple people familiar with the issue.
Trump’s White House plans to send a rescissions package to Capitol Hill this week, sources tell us. The package includes $9.3 billion in cuts to the State Department, NPR and PBS and more.
White House officials briefed Republican aides on the Hill in both chambers last week on the package, we’re told.
The vast majority of these cuts will be on the foreign aid side, making up roughly $8 billion, sources said. Trump has already shuttered USAID, folding it into the State Department.
What to expect: The rescissions package has a fast-track procedure in the House and Senate that allows it to be considered with just a simple majority required for passage in the Senate.
Some conservative hardliners wanted Trump to go bigger with the rescissions package, but White House officials and GOP leaders are wary of a re-run of 2018, when a rescissions effort narrowly failed in the Senate. And even with a 53-47 majority this time, Senate passage is hardly guaranteed. Moderate Republicans and defense hawks may balk at some of the foreign aid cuts.
Democrats will object to the White House rescinding money already approved by Congress, arguing that this is the executive branch interfering with the legislative branch’s power of the purse. The shuttering of USAID has had a huge impact internationally, with China and other foreign powers moving in to take advantage of the American withdrawal.
More cuts ahead: The Trump administration is cutting hundreds of foreign aid programs. The State Department also wants to axe embassies and consulates under a major organizational shift initiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Yet the package is just a small part of what Trump and White House officials are planning on slashing in FY 2026. The Health and Human Services Department faces potentially dramatic cuts, while Trump has ordered the elimination of the Education Department.
Medicaid and SNAP could see hundreds of billions in spending reductions and new restrictions. DOGE has fired tens of thousands of federal employees. Overall, these are some of the biggest changes to the structure of federal agencies and the direction of federal spending in decades.
The DOGE initiative, however, has yielded only a fraction of the savings that Elon Musk and the White House have claimed it would bring, while causing a national uproar.
GOP senators also have been talking about a rescissions package more as a way to shield DOGE from the myriad of lawsuits targeting its authority to slash spending already approved by Congress. Senate Majority Leader John Thune met with OMB Director Russell Vought recently. The South Dakota Republican told us that senators have “a high level of interest” in this.
In addition, Trump and Hill Republicans want to use the budget reconciliation process to boost spending on the Pentagon and border security while extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts.
Several House panels will begin committee markups next week on the programmatic and legal changes needed to comply with the budget resolution instructions for reconciliation, including Armed Services, Education and Workforce, Judiciary, Homeland Security, Oversight and Transportation and Infrastructure.
Committees with the more difficult tasks – Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means, for instance – will mark up later.
House GOP leaders are rushing to try to finish work on the reconciliation package by Memorial Day, although we still have our doubts about that proposed timetable.
