Battling the clock and fierce opposition by Democrats, media and rouge members of their own party, Republicans succeeded in saving taxpayers $9.0 billion – and from being forced to continue subsidizing public media – by passing a defunding bill on Friday.

The GOP’s slim margins of control in both the House and Senate became even more tenuous when a small handful of defiant Republicans in both chambers disagreed with aspects of the effort to rescind $9 billion of spending, including a billion dollars earmarked for public media, which had been previously authorized.

With the Trump Administration’s one and only chance to rescind the money set to expire at midnight, the House voted in the 12 a.m. hour Friday to adopt the Senate’s changes to the measure (H.R. 4), which reduced the spending savings from $9.4 billion to $9.0 billion, by a 216-213 margin. Once adopted, the amended defunding bill that had been passed by the Senate, 51-48, in the early-morning hours Thursday, was then sent to Pres. Trump for his signature on Friday.

The House vote was finally taken after Democrats exhausted their efforts to delay it by ranting about completely irrelevant issues, ranging from immigration enforcement to the Justice Department’s files on deceased, convicted sex crime offender Jeffrey Epstein.

While the bulk of the spending defunded by the bill would have gone to USAID, slightly more than a billion dollars of it had been appropriated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funnels taxpayer money to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).

At 12:40 a.m. Friday morning, Pres. Trump cheered the news of House vote in a social media post, noting that his administration accomplished what Republicans had been unable to do for decades:

“HOUSE APPROVES NINE BILLION DOLLAR CUTS PACKAGE, INCLUDING ATROCIOUS NPR AND PUBLIC BROADCASTING, WHERE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR WERE WASTED. REPUBLICANS HAVE TRIED DOING THIS FOR 40 YEARS, AND FAILED….BUT NO MORE. THIS IS BIG!!!”

Public media’s well-documented, egregious liberal bias and propaganda have long violated its responsibility to provide fair and balanced reporting, while today’s plethora of alternative news sources (even in rural areas) have rendered it unnecessary, prompting its defunding.

And, as evidenced by the local coverage of the recent devastating, deadly floods in Texas, private media have shown they can provide more timely and comprehensive reports of vital news to residents in local areas.

Through what’s known as the “rescission” process, a president sends a request to Congress asking that money previously authorized to be spent, but that has not yet been spent, be unauthorized. Once he does, the rescission package must be passed by Congress within 45 days or it cannot be rescinded during that president’s term in office. Friday, July 18, 2025, was the last day that the spending for USAID and public media could be rescinded.