This week, the Senate will vote to rescind $9.4 billion of spending Congress previously appropriated. The so-called rescissions bill, requested by the Trump administration in June, would ax funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and various foreign-aid accounts. The House has already passed the bill, and since rescissions are immune to filibusters, a simple majority of the Senate can pass the cuts into law. If Republicans are remotely sincere about limiting the federal government’s scope, they should pass the bill without delay.
Admittedly, the fiscal impact of this bill would be tiny. The federal budget includes $7 trillion in annual outlays. These rescissions amount to less than 1 percent of nondefense discretionary spending. But they are worth passing regardless. Congress may be unwilling to reform unsustainable entitlement programs — the principal driver of our fiscal crisis — but it should take every opportunity to cut unwarranted spending wherever it exists.
President Trump has chosen the targets of his rescissions well. His request would completely defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides half a billion dollars each year to support public radio and television stations. Its two major beneficiaries are PBS and NPR, outlets whose progressive bias is pervasive and well documented. But even if they were straight-down-the-middle, news and entertainment programming should not be financed by the government.
Our country is home to more than 15,000 commercial radio stations and 4,000 television stations, in addition to a sprawling ecosystem of print, cable, and online media. Viewers and listeners of PBS and NPR are significantly more affluent than the average American, which gives them the means to support public broadcasting through voluntary contributions. Surely they could fill the gap of the 15 percent of funding that currently comes from the federal government (and get some tote bags in the bargain).
The rescissions bill would also decrease, but not eliminate, money for foreign assistance. Excluding Israel and Ukraine, the United States spent nearly $52 billion on foreign aid last year. Trump wants to rescind just $8.3 billion. The largest cut would be $2.5 billion to development assistance, which has a shoddy track record of fostering economic growth in poorer countries. Another $460 million would be cut from assistance to Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, an account created in the 1990s to help former Soviet states transition away from communism. (Mission accomplished.) A $125 million fund to promote clean energy technologies abroad would also be withdrawn. All of these cuts would help refocus a foreign-aid apparatus that often forgets it exists to serve U.S. interests.
The rescissions process was established by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to replace unilateral impoundment of funds by the president. President Reagan was the most prolific utilizer of rescissions, sending 133 packages of spending cuts worth billions of dollars to Congress, which approved 101 of them. Regrettably, no rescissions have been successfully enacted since the turn of the century. It’s time to revive a forgotten practice.