WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans are making changes to a $9.4 billion package of spending cuts proposed by President Donald Trump as they race to pass the measure by a Friday deadline.
After a lunch meeting Tuesday with White House budget director Russell Vought, they agreed on one significant change: removing about $400 million in cuts to PEPFAR, the Bush-era foreign aid program to combat HIV/AIDS, which has been credited with saving millions of lives.
It was done with the aim of securing the simple majority needed to pass the rescissions package through the Senate, after several Republicans expressed opposition to those cuts.
“There’s a substitute amendment that I think has a good chance of passing,” Vought told reporters. “PEPFAR will not be impacted by the rescissions.”
Senate Republican leaders hope to hold a key vote to proceed on the measure on Tuesday evening, before triggering a period of debate and an open amendment process.
It remains unclear if the bill has the 51 votes needed in the Senate, where the GOP controls 53 seats. Republicans plan on passing it on party lines through a rarely used filibuster-proof process that gives Congress 45 days from the time of the White House request to get it to the president’s desk. That deadline is Friday.
The Senate’s plan to amend the bill means it will have to pass the GOP-controlled House again before Trump can sign it into law.
“There was a lot of interest among our members in doing something on the PEPFAR issue, and so that’s reflected in the substitute,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters. “And we hope that if we can get this across the finish line in the Senate, that the House would accept that one small modification that ends up making the package still about a $9 billion rescissions package. A little less than what was sent over the House, but nonetheless a significant down payment on getting rid of waste, fraud, abuse in our government.”
The bulk of the cuts are to foreign aid. The package also slashes $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR. That has sparked objections from some Republicans, who say constituents in rural areas rely on those stations for essential matters like emergency alerts.
Thune said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who had concerns about rural broadcasting, struck an agreement with the White House that “allows them to reprogram some funding that would address the 28 stations around the country that receive funding through CPB that are on our Native American reservations.”
Rounds said he will support the legislation as a result.
“This is a direct agreement with OMB that they would transfer the funds over to the Department of the Interior. The Department of the Interior has agreed to accept it and to issue the grants,” he said. “We’ve told them very clearly what we want is those resources to be made available to these Native American radio stations.”
The White House said it will resume spending the funds if the Senate doesn’t send Trump the package by the 45-day deadline.
“We have to remove our hold on the money,” Vought said. “So we will not implement the cuts if this vote doesn’t go our way.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has slammed the proposed cuts and warned that if Republicans rescind spending programs approved in bipartisan deals, it would make it harder to achieve the 60 votes needed to strike a funding deal this fall.
He said Tuesday that Democrats still hope to keep spending decisions bipartisan.
“We are doing everything we can — everything we can to keep the bipartisan appropriations process going forward,” Schumer said.
