Pres. Donald Trump has sent a “rescission” proposal – a little-known tactic to stop wasteful spending – to Congress, in an effort to save taxpayers $9.4 billion.
“Today, we sent the first rescissions package to Capitol Hill. This package contains BILLIONS in wasteful foreign aid and federal funding for NPR and PBS,” the White House Office of Management and Budget announced Tuesday afternoon.
But, what is “rescission” and why are Trump and Congressional Republicans employing it?
Rescission is the act of rescinding (taking back, cancelling) something – in this case, government spending.
To qualify for rescission, the proposal must:
Once the president has sent his rescission proposal to Congress, as Trump did on Tuesday:
Trump and Republicans are using rescission because it offers four major advantages that make it the most promising path to defunding wasteful spending that’s already been appropriated by Congress:
- It can be passed with simple majority votes (half, plus one) in both the House and Senate, where Republicans hold slim majorities.
- It cannot be blocked by a filibuster in the Senate.
- Debate is limited to 10 hours.
- If the Appropriations Committee has not reported a rescission bill after 25 days, any Member can make a motion to discharge the bill from the Committee, which would require the support of at least one-fifth of the House and Senate to pass. The bill would then be subject to a vote by the full chamber.
Additionally, if the Parliamentarian rules against the proposal, Congress can vote to override the decision and bring the proposal up for a vote, anyway.
The downside: rescission is a one-shot deal. If it fails, it may not be proposed again to rescind funding for the same appropriation.
Thus, since they hold very slim majorities in both chambers, Republican leaders will need to muster the full support of their party members in both the House and Senate in order to pass any rescission proposal.
Example: Rescission of PBS, NPR and CPB Funding
The cuts contained in Pres. Trump’s proposal include the rescission of $1.1 billion allocated to fund public media, namely, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funnels the taxpayer money to PBS and NPR.
As a coalition of conservatives explained in a letter to Pres. Trump back in April, public media have both outlived their necessity and violated their charter.
Publicly-funded media were created at a time when (unlike today) many Americans, particularly those in rural areas, had limited access to news and information. Today, however, Americans have a virtually unlimited number of sources of news, entertainment and educational programing, thanks to the internet, cable and satellite services, etc.
Additionally, Trump’s rescission proposal seeks to stop funding public media because American taxpayers should not be forced to finance the well-documented and egregious bias of the content produced by PBS and NPR, which caters to only one side of the political spectrum. PBS and NPR are required to be non-partisan, yet they aggressively promote liberal propaganda – and attack the conservative viewpoints held by many of the taxpayers who are being forced to fund them (about half the nation).
In a social media post, the White House Office of Management and Budget lists other types of wasteful spending the rescission proposal seeks to eliminate, which are costing taxpayers billions of dollars each year.
The History of Rescission
Since the Impoundment Control Act was passed in 1974, presidents have proposed nearly $92 billion in cuts through rescission, of which nearly $25 billion were accepted by Congress, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all successfully used rescissions to enact spending cuts, though Trump’s lone rescission proposal during his first term in office was rejected by the Senate. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not attempt to use the rescission process.