House Republicans have narrowly advanced a request from the White House to claw back $9.4 billion that lawmakers have already approved for public media and more than a dozen accounts across the State Department focused on foreign assistance.
The 214-212 vote is a major victory for President Donald Trump, who had been lobbying hard for lawmakers to pass the legislation, including in a social media post shortly before members went to the floor.
“For decades, Republicans have promised to cut NPR, but have never done it, until now,” Trump said, in part. “The Rescissions Bill is a NO BRAINER, and every single Republican in Congress should vote, ‘YES.’ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
It’s also a huge relief for Speaker Mike Johnson, who hours earlier was projecting cautious optimism that the package of funding cuts would pass despite knowing his margins were exceedingly narrow.
“We think we have the votes. We’re going ahead with it,” Johnson told reporters Thursday afternoon.
One “yes” vote: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who is known to frequently break with his party.
“First time I’ve ever seen us cut spending in my life. I would be ‘yea’ all day long,” Massie said in a brief interview earlier this week, previewing his support.
The legislation would revoke $8.3 billion in foreign aid and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting. It faced opposition from some Republican lawmakers concerned about slashing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and how emergency alerts could be impacted by the public media cuts.
House Republican leadership and White House officials spent days trying to assuage the concerns of lawmakers worried that the clawbacks would hurt their local public broadcasting stations, emergency alert systems and efforts to prevent AIDS around the world.
The fight to convince House Republicans continued up until the final gavel on Thursday. Johnson and Whip Tom Emmer huddled with the holdouts on the House floor during the vote to try to sway them in favor of the measure after they had already voted against the measure.
At one point, as many as six Republicans were recorded as voting