House Republicans are raising concerns about cuts to public broadcasting and an AIDS prevention program that are part of a $9.4 billion package of spending reductions scheduled for a vote Thursday.
The spending cuts — $8.3 billion from various foreign aid accounts and $1.1 billion from public broadcasting — are the first set of Department of Government Efficiency savings that the White House has asked Congress to codify through a process known as rescissions.
Congress previously appropriated the funding, but if the rescissions package is enacted, the White House will no longer be obligated to spend it.
House GOP leaders said they are confident they can alleviate members’ concerns without removing any cuts from the $9.4 billion package. They can afford no more than three Republican defections if all Democrats vote against it.
“It’s going to pass,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Minnesota Republican, said.
The Trump administration said the funds it wants lawmakers to claw back are “wasteful and unnecessary spending.”
“These rescissions would eliminate programs that are antithetical to American interests, such as funding the World Health Organization, LGBTQI+ activities, ‘equity’ programs, radical Green New Deal-type policies, and color revolutions in hostile places around the world,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said in a letter accompanying the rescissions request.
In addition to those cuts to foreign aid, the package would eliminate most public funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit that helps fund public media like NPR, PBS and their local affiliates.
Mr. Vought said federal spending on CPB “subsidizes a public media system that is politically biased and is an unnecessary expense to the taxpayer.”
However, a handful of House Republicans are pushing back against the CPB cuts, worried about the impact on local affiliates of PBS and NPR, which are often the only media outlets operating in rural areas.
“I’m looking for something that acknowledges that local stations are important,” Rep. Mark Amodei, Nevada Republican, said. “And if you want to punish the national people, fine by me.”
The $1.1 billion CPB cut the rescissions package would claw back was advanced funding for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. Mr. Amodei said 70% of that funding would go to local TV stations and that eliminating that funding would require the local affiliates to raise money to make up the gap, which he argues they can’t do as easily as the national outlets.
Mr. Amodei, a senior appropriator, said he’s not made a final decision to oppose the rescissions package if the full CBP cuts remain in it. He’s not heard from anyone at the White House seeking to address his concerns, and he said GOP leaders do not want to tweak the bill.
No House Republican has said definitively that they will vote against the package, and even some who have raised issues with it said they support enough of the cuts to vote “yes.”
That includes Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, another senior GOP appropriator who shares Mr. Amodei’s concerns about the CPB cuts impacting local affiliates but is supportive of the broader package.
“I’ve talked to the public television staff. They understand the issues,” he said.
Rep. Don Bacon, Nebraska Republican, also has concerns about the cuts to public broadcasting.
“I think they should restore some of it, frankly, but we’ll see,” he said.
Mr. Bacon wouldn’t say whether he’d oppose the package if the broadcast funding cuts are not scaled back, noting he is letting other colleagues take the lead on that issue after he pressed for answers about cuts to the AIDS prevention program.
The rescissions package proposes to cut $400 million of the $6 billion appropriated in fiscal 2025 for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program created during the George W. Bush administration to combat HIV/AIDS around the world.
Mr. Bacon said he was initially concerned that the rescissions package would claw back all federal funding for PEPFAR, but he became more comfortable with it after learning it would only slash a small portion of the program’s budget.
He was assured that the PEPFAR cuts would not be applied to life-saving medical preventions and treatments but instead are focused on eliminating “woke” training programs.
The White House has provided a handful of examples of wasteful PEPFAR spending, including $5.1 million to strengthen the “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer global movements;” $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia; and $833,000 for services for “transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks” in Nepal.
Several Republicans said they were still examining the potential impacts of the rescissions before deciding whether to vote for the $9.4 billion in cuts.
“I just want to make sure that we’re not [eliminating] something that should stay active,” Washington Rep. Daniel Newhouse said.
Rep. David Joyce, Ohio Republican, also told The Washington Times he was continuing to review the package. He declined to get into specific concerns, but previously told a NOTUS reporter that he would be concerned if the PEPFAR cuts would impact medical treatments.
Rep. David Valadao, California Republican, told a PBS reporter he had concerns about the rescissions package, but he declined to comment when The Times asked him about it.
Messrs. Newhouse, Joyce and Valadao are all appropriators who have a more vested interest in spending approved by Congress than other rank-and-file members who do not serve on the committee that digs into funding details.
If the rescissions package passes the House unchanged, it is not guaranteed to get through the Senate without tweaks.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, Maine Republican, said she is opposed to the PEPFAR funding cuts and wants to remove that provision.
“They’re cutting prevention programs, and they should not be doing that,” she said. “It’s been extremely successful.”
• Kerry Picket contributed to this report.
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.