WASHINGTON—As Congress gears up for a fight over the rescissions package that would make permanent many of the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts, House Republicans are encouraging their colleagues to seize the moment.
“If we can pass this with some sense of urgency, then that invites the White House to send more rescission packages up to Capitol Hill,” Congressman Mark Harris (R-NC) Harris told The Daily Wire on Monday. “That’s the way I’ve been describing it back in the Eighth District of North Carolina to my people, because they want to see some action, and this is the way we’re going to see it done.”
The bill, which the Office of Management and Budget sent to Congress in early June, contains many of the cuts that were revealed by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative. Examples highlighted by the OMB include funding for NPR and PBS, “Being LGBTI in the Caribbean,” and “training women in gender equity.”
The rescissions package also includes cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program, which OMB reported hid payments for programs like “transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks” in Nepal, “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements,” and circumcision, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia.
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has spoken out against cutting PEPFAR from the budget, which was intended to assist those affected by HIV and AIDS.
“I want to strike the rescission of funds for PEPFAR, which has an enormous record of success, having saved some 26 million lives over the course of the program, as well as preventing nearly 8 million infants from receiving AIDS from their infected mothers,” Collins said. “So I can’t imagine why we would want to terminate that program.”
Harris, who voted to pass the rescissions package through the House, commented about Collins’ gripes about the bill.
“We’ve got to remember we are $37 trillion in debt,” Harris continued. “We have got to take care of America first. … And if we’re not maintaining our own economic health — if we’re not maintaining our own economic future — we’re not going to be any good to anybody on any continent.”
Holdout Republican members are not only in the crosshairs of the Senate whips, but of the president as well.
Recently, President Donald Trump posted about the rescissions package that “any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement.”
It is unclear how Collins, who is expected to campaign to keep her seat during the midterm elections, would be affected by Trump’s lack of endorsement.
The rescissions package must arrive on Trump’s desk by Friday, or it would expire, causing the payments exposed by DOGE to continue.
“We’ve all been supportive of the work that DOGE has done, and this has been just the start,” Harris said. “It’s time for us to make sure that we are taking the congressional action that we need to take.”