US Politics
Trump’s $9B clawback against PBS and NPR may have bought him a government shutdown come fall
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All of the chaos caused by the bombshell report in The Wall Street Journal that President Donald Trump sent a bawdy 50th birthday note to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein masked the fact he received a significant win.
Republicans successfully passed legislation in the late night to claw back $9 billion meant for foreign aid, as well as for PBS and NPR funding.
This was a major priority for Republicans ever since the early days of the Trump administration, when Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to USAID and Trump signed an executive order to block money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
And defunding NPR and PBS has been a Republican wishlist item for decades.
In the end, only two Republicans in the House voted against the legislation. But by winning on rescission, Trump might have punched a one-way ticket toward a government shutdown when Congress returns after the August recess.
Trump might have sealed his fate because of the tactic he and Republicans in Congress used to claw back the money.
Under the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, when a president wants to withhold money Congress already set aside to be spent, a practice called rescissions, he must submit a rescissions message that expires after 45 days.
Rescissions can be done with only 51 votes, therefore, allowing the majority to do so without a filibuster as a trade-off for the limited timeline. That meant that Republicans did it with zero input from the Democrats.
“If Republicans cave to Donald Trump and gut these investments agreed to by both parties, that would be an affront – a huge affront – to the bipartisan appropriations process,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in floor remarks earlier this month.
But it does not seem like Republicans are that worried. Indeed, Russell Vought, the director of Office of Management and Budget, said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast that he wanted the process to be less bipartisan.
“Who ran and won on an agenda of a bipartisan appropriations process? Literally no one. No Democrat, no Republican. There is no voter in the country that went to the polls and said, ‘I’m voting for a bipartisan appropriations process,” Vought said.
The problem is that the appropriations process to write the budget is bipartisan by design. Appropriations bills cannot be passed without 60 votes and the government runs out of money at the end of September.
“Much of what we’re doing, we’re going through the motions, but it’s not real and that’s why watching the committee process has been pretty painful,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, told The Independent.
For the longest time, Republicans have hated the appropriations process because they think it keeps spending high because members have to work together. There’s even an old saying in Washington that there are three parties: Democrats, Republicans and appropriators.
Pocan is a progressive Democrat not alone. Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), a moderate Democrat and member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, also expressed disappointment.
“I’m committed to that, but it does make us wonder, you know, if they’re really committed to their end of the bargain,” Scholten told The Independent.
Of course, this means that Democrats would actually need to follow through with their threat. Trump showed he could break the House Freedom Caucus, the supposed hellraisers in the House GOP conference who frequently stamp their feet and then ultimately fold.
In the same token, Democrats are not naturals in being in the minority, given they controlled the House — and therefore the appropriations process — for most of the 20th century.
That means they would actually have to be willing to walk away from negotiations with Republicans and allow them to twist in the wind, even if it means programs Democrats consider vital go without money for a while. Earlier this year, Schumer went along with the stop-gap spending bill to avoid a shutdown even though Republicans ramrodded it through the House and Senate with zero Democratic input.
But if Democrats actually shoot the hostage and leave Republicans to actually reach out to them rather than pass spending cuts in a partisan way, then Trump will be able to trace a government shutdown to this late-night vote.
And he will have no one to blame but himself, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
