The White House will soon send Congress a package of $9.4 billion cuts to current federal spending that includes slashing funding for NPR and PBS and a chunk of foreign aid from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The Department of Government Efficiency identified the cuts, which consist of $8.3 billion from foreign aid and $1.1 billion from NPR and PBS, which are funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The clawback would virtually zero out taxpayer support of the CPB except for services such as Amber alerts and tornado warnings.
CPB declined to comment on plans to cancel its funding.
The package, known as rescissions legislation, would cancel spending previously approved by Congress. It will arrive in Congress shortly after Elon Musk’s exit from DOGE, though President Trump vowed it would continue to downsize the federal bureaucracy by identifying wasteful and fraudulent spending for elimination.
Democrats denounce the cuts, saying they wipe out valuable services and harm Americans and U.S. interests abroad. They say slashing CPB funding was an attack on free speech.
The cuts are cheered by conservatives who have long railed against the liberal bias of the taxpayer-supported NPR and PBS, as well as foreign aid programs they say push woke policies.
Still, Republican deficit hawks scoffed at Mr. Trump sending Congress a package of $9.4 billion in permanent cuts to federal spending, despite DOGE slashing nearly $200 billion from the current accounts.
“We’re totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent. …. Most of it is going to come later,” Mr. Trump said Friday at an Oval Office press conference where he bid farewell to Mr. Musk as a special White House employee.
The president said the rescissions package was just the first bite of the DOGE cuts, and more would come in the “big, beautiful bill” and other spending measures.
“We’re going to have it codified by Congress,” the president said. “It’s hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Congressional Republicans are eager to take up the $9.4 billion in cuts, which the House and Senate can pass without Democratic votes.
Speaker Mike Johnson said the House is “ready to act on DOGE’s findings so we can deliver even more cuts to big government that Mr. Trump wants and the American people demand.”
The Louisiana Republican vowed to “act quickly.”
The White House’s formal transmission of the rescissions package to Congress will trigger a 45-day clock for lawmakers to adopt or reject the package. The White House is confident it will pass both chambers, unlike Mr. Trump’s 2018 rescission plan, which failed narrowly in the Senate.
The package of cuts will arrive just days after NPR CEO Katherine Maher and three Colorado public radio stations sued the administration over Mr. Trump’s order to cut funding from NPR and PBS.
Ms. Maher was grilled by GOP lawmakers in March when she appeared before the House’s DOGE panel. She was scrutinized for social media posts in 2020 in which she called Mr. Trump “a fascist and a deranged racist sociopath.”
“I regret those tweets,” she said. “I would not tweet them again today. They represented a time where I was reflecting on something that I believe the president had said, rather than who he is. I don’t presume that anyone is a racist.”
NPR requested and received a $1.9 million grant commitment from CPB to hire more editors and journalists in Oct. 2024 to fill 11 positions that would help the outlet adhere “to the highest standards of editorial integrity – accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity, and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.”
However, Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers were already preparing to pull funds from PBS and NPR. He told reporters he thought both outlets were “very biased” and a “waste of money.”
The White House also justifies putting the outlets on the chopping block by citing programs that promote a liberal agenda, such as PBS’s “Real Boy,” a program about a trans teen, and “Our League,” a show about a trans woman returning to her hometown.
The remaining $8.3 billion from the recissions package will be cut from foreign aid at the State Department primarily within USAID, such as $882,000 for social media mentorship in Serbia and Belarus, $5 million for “green transportation and logistics,” $333,000 for promoting tourism in the Caucasus, $750,000 for reducing xenophobia in Venezuela and $638,000 for media activity in Belarus.
Other cuts at USAID include:
• $167,000 for free education and healthcare in Ecuador and Venezuela.
• $889,000 for electoral reforms and voter education in Kenya.
• $1 million for voter ID in Haiti.
• $33,000 for “Being LGBTI in the Caribbean.”
• $643,000 for LGBTQI+ programs in the Western Balkans;
• $567,000 for LBGTQI+ programs in Uganda.
• $8,000 for promoting vegan food in Zambia;
• $500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda;
• $4 million for legume systems research;
• $67,000 for feeding insect powder to children in Madagascar;
• $6 million for “Net Zero Cities” in Mexico.
• $3 million for Iraqi Sesame Street;
• $4 million for “sedentary migrants” in Colombia;
• $1 million for programs to strengthen the resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer global movements;
• $6 million for supporting media organizations and the civic life of Palestinians.
• $2.5 million for teaching young children how to make environmentally friendly
“reproductive health” decisions.
• $614,700 for climate adaptation, including growing coral reefs in the Caribbean.
• $595,400 for training of women in gender equity.
• $716,000 for the training of citizen journalists.
• $1.2 million for the “Afrobarometer public opinion survey.”
• $100,000 for Harvard to conduct research models for peace.
• $100,000 for NYU to analyze democracy field experiment in South Sudan.
• $77,000 for the University of Denver for “Escaping the Ethnic Trap in Deeply Divided Societies.”
The recissions package makes cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), including:
• $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia.
• $5 .1 million to strengthen the “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements.”
• $833,000 for services for “transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks” in Nepal.
The USAID cuts also take $22 million out of the African Development Foundation for programs such as graphic design training in Nigeria and the “African Hive Camping and Tours” to create adventure trips for backpackers.
