Senate Republicans are barreling toward a vote codifying $9.4 billion in Department of Government Efficiency cuts. Whether they have the votes is another question.
At the moment, senators say they’re still looking for basic answers on what’s in the rescission bill. They’re planning on pressing Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought for details at a closed-door Senate GOP lunch on Tuesday, just hours before an initial procedural vote on the bill is supposed to take place.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he wants to move forward with the first round of votes on the bill on Tuesday. But he doesn’t seem to know whether Republicans are onboard.
“I don’t know the answer to that at this point,” Thune said Monday when asked whether he has 51 votes to pass the bill without making changes. Thune said leadership has gotten “a lot of feedback, and I know there are folks who would like to see at least some modest changes to it.”
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“But it’s always, again, what the traffic will bear,” he said.
It’s hardly the first time GOP lawmakers have cut it close this term. Earlier this month, congressional Republicans passed their marquee reconciliation bill just barely before their self-imposed July 4 deadline. But unlike reconciliation, rescissions have a statutory deadline for passage. If the bill isn’t signed into law by the end of July 18, the appropriated government funding has to be spent.
That’d be a blow to President Donald Trump’s agenda to slash government programs, particularly considering the bill’s targeted cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting, two areas conservatives loathe.
The bill’s proposed cuts aren’t all that massive of a dollar figure in congressional terms. But lawmakers say they’re still looking for answers on exactly which programs will be cut by the legislation. A group of Senate Republicans met on Monday night to discuss the bill. Sen. Thom Tillis said it was a group of members “asking for details in areas where they only have top line targets for cuts.”
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins was one of those lawmakers in the meeting. She told reporters it’s not clear which “specific global health programs” are subject to rollbacks as part of the proposed $500 million in cuts in the bill.
“So that’s really important,” Collins said. “There are programs to prevent malaria, polio, tuberculosis, the [Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization] programs. There’s maternal and child health programs, there are nutrition programs. It’s just, we still are lacking the level of detail that is needed to make the right decisions.”
Beyond those answers, a number of lawmakers still expect the bill, which passed the House in June, will need to be changed and sent back to the House in order to reach the president’s desk.
There are still a number of members with concerns over cuts to foreign aid, including the reductions to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, an HIV-AIDS prevention program that operates globally. Some Republicans are also opposed to cuts to public broadcasting, which is a primary resource for information in many poor and rural communities.
“We gotta do what we can to pass it here, and I don’t know if we can pass it in its current form,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin said Monday of potentially changing the bill. “I’d prefer not to do it … But we got some unique personalities we got to deal with, like the House does.”
The bill will still require a vote to be discharged from committee — as well as a vote on a motion to proceed — before things really get rolling. Rescissions packages are subject to a vote-a-rama, which entails a lengthy array of amendments from both sides that often delay passage.
Democrats are sure to throw out their best hits on the legislation, but rules require amendments to be germane, meaning they must be strictly related to subject matter already detailed in the bill. That limits the world of possibilities.
But they’ll still try — and Republicans are likely to seek some changes, too.
Sen. Brian Schatz, the current Democratic chief deputy whip and a candidate for Senate Democratic whip next term, said that as the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, “I get letters from these members asking me to plus-up the accounts that they’re about to rescind.”
“None of them want to do this,” Schatz said. “They’re being dragged across the starting line and presumably across the finish line. So the simplest way to handle this is to say, ‘This is the legislature’s job, and we’ll handle it from here.’”
That’s all before the bill would need to head back to the House for final passage as well, if it’s changed even a word in the Senate. If the bill is amended, which is beginning to seem more likely than not, that would chew up time — which Republicans don’t have much of.
Speaker Mike Johnson has urged Senate Republicans to keep the bill as close to the House-passed version as possible, in hopes of not complicating the legislation further. Johnson has small margins to work with in the House and a range of ideological differences that are no small feat to bridge.
But as Thune noted on Monday, he’s got his own Senate math to deal with.
“We want to get on it,” he said. “We’re going to need 51 to get on, and 51 to get off.”
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