Rescissions: Trump's push to control federal spending

We've supported him for 56 years, said Rich Lowry in National Review, but it's time for Big Bird to "make his own way in the world." At President Trump's urging, Senate Republicans passed a rare "rescissions" bill last week, "clawing back" some $9 billion in congressionally authorized spending, including about $8 billion in foreign aid and $1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund National Public Radio, PBS, and their local member stations. Liberals howled, and even moderate GOP Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joined Democrats in opposition, but the outrage is misplaced. Institutions like NPR and Sesame Street have huge, loyal audiences that will ensure their survival. And in this age of "media churn," it's ridiculous for the government to prop up "a few select outlets"—especially ones "pervasively biased" against conservatives. For NPR in particular, this is a "self-inflicted wound," said former NPR editor Uri Berliner in The Free Press. In recent years, the network abandoned neutrality in favor of progressive, "agenda-driven journalism," ignoring stories like Hunter Biden's laptop to run endless "moralizing" features on systemic racism and trans rights. This vote means NPR is now "free to be as partisan as it chooses," while American taxpayers are free to choose which outlets they want to support with their own money.

Complaints about the "left-leaning assumptions" of PBS and NPR have some merit, said The New York Times in an editorial, but defunding all of public media is the wrong solution. NPR will be "just fine" without the 2% of its budget that comes from the government. But the cuts will devastate hundreds of small radio and TV stations, often the only source of local news in rural areas, hastening the "decline of America's once robust media ecosystem." That's the point, said Paul Farhi in The Atlantic. It's all part of Trump's "frontal assault" on independent reporting, which has seen him file numerous lawsuits against insufficiently deferential news outlets, commandeer the White House press pool, and install loyalist Brendan Carr as head of the Federal Communications Commission. "So far, he's winning" this war.

Trump also wants to diminish Congress, said Catie Edmondson in The New York Times. The $9 billion rescinded last week is a tiny share of the $7 trillion federal budget. But by getting lawmakers to reverse their own spending decisions, Trump weakened Congress's power of the purse and further asserted his "maximalist view" of presidential power. Russell Vought, head of Trump's Office of Management and Budget, is already working on more rescission bills, said Ed Kilgore in New York. Because they can be passed by a simple, filibuster-proof majority, they're an easy tool "to impose absolute majority rule over all spending decisions," and especially useful when that majority is beholden to Trump.

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Vought risks overplaying his hand, said Jennifer Scholtes in Politico. Sure, with a "grimace," Republicans gave the White House a win this time. But are they really going to become a rubber stamp for rescissions, letting Trump and Vought make "the ultimate end run around their funding power?" Probably not, said Eric Boehm in Reason, and it's too bad. After the failure of DOGE, and a Trump megabill that will add another $3.4 trillion to the deficit, last week's cuts brought a sliver of cheer to spending hawks. But the fact that it took the tiebreaking vote of Vice President JD Vance to enact these paltry savings is a "depressing reminder" of how hard it is to have Congress acknowledge, let alone tackle, our looming "fiscal mess."