WASHINGTON—The White House rescissions package is full of billions in woke, wasteful spending that should have been dealt with long ago, Congressman Brian Mast told The Daily Wire.
The Florida Republican weighed in after the White House announced it had sent its first rescissions package to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, a package that the White House says targets billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse, as well as foreign aid and federal funding for both NPR and PBS.
Passing the rescissions package would codify the cuts the Department of Government Efficiency had proposed. A vote is expected next week.
“We’re talking about roughly $10 billion, and let’s say $8.5 billion of that largely comes from the State Department, USAID,” Mast explained to The Daily Wire. “In that, if you really wanted to break it down, you would need an encyclopedia to do it because there’s so many little different things that are going to so many international organizations.”
Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the congressman said, much of this waste was hidden.
NEW: 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.
Here’s just some of the waste, fraud, and abuse identified: ????
— Office of Management and Budget (@WHOMB) June 3, 2025
“So where the State Department, under the previous administration, was really nickel and diming the American people under a host of different programs, whether they called it global health or whether they called it international organizations or whether they called it USAID, or whether they called it migration in refugee assistance, they nickeled and dimed in all of these different places to do these very much social engineering programs,” he explained.
He pointed to some of these expenditures: $33,000 for “Being LGBTI in the Caribbean,” $643,000 for LGBTQ+ programs in the Western Balkans,” and “$567,000 for LGBTQI+ programs in Uganda.”
“These countries were upset that we were doing them to begin with,” Mast added in reference to the woke initiatives. He said he has spoken to many of the ambassadors to these countries over the last six months. “They’re so glad to see these programs go away.”
Other woke items that would be cut include $67,000 for testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar, $5 million for the “Minority Serving Institute Fellowship Cooperative Agreement,” $595,400 for training women in gender equity, $500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda, $6 million for “net zero cities” in Mexico, $2.1 million for climate resilience in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and East Africa $5 million for “green transportation and logistics” in Eurasia, $4 million for “legume systems research,” $3 million for Iraqi Sesame Street, and more.
Mast went through a number of these items, ripping into the massive amounts of money spent on such niche and ideological interests.
“Why are we doing that for Mexico, and not putting money into the cities in the United States of America?” he asked of the funds going to Mexico’s “net zero cities.”
“Most people would have no idea” about the items that have been paid for with taxpayer dollars right under their noses, he pointed out. “They’re just hidden in there until you actually get in there and start digging.”
Asked about pushback from Democrats to the White House rescissions package, Mast suggested that resistance to the cuts is “largely an uneducated pushback.”
“Democrats will look at this and they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, you’re cutting something for migration and refugee assistance.'”
They’ll also focus on things that are lifestyle choices, rather than life-saving choices, he added.
“We’re just blowing money on it year after year after year, decade after decade after decade.”
Mast believes that Republicans can get the cuts through, and “truthfully,” he thinks they should go much further. For now, it will do.