By Jacob Bogage —
Trump asks Congress to repeal $9 billion from NPR, PBS and global aid
The White House budget office on Tuesday urged Congress to cancel more than $9 billion in funding for global health and for public radio and TV stations, as President Donald Trump attempts to assert more control over congressional spending authority.
The proposal, sent to lawmakers by White House budget director and key policy architect Russell Vought, asks Congress to “rescind,” or repeal, $8.3 billion in foreign aid and more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which supports NPR and PBS.
Among the cuts are resources to combat HIV/AIDS around the world through the U.S. Agency for International Development, fund U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization, support international peacekeeping activities and provide media services to U.S. consumers.
Much of the money had already been slashed by the U.S. DOGE Service – until recently headed by billionaire Elon Musk – while the administration has refused to spend the rest. Some lawmakers have said the only way to make those spending cuts permanent is to pass legislation, which is what the White House is now trying to do.
“When you’ve got a $2 trillion deficit, you’re going to have to cut things you’d not only like to cut, you’re going to have to cut things you’d prefer not to,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma).
Trump has been testing the legal boundaries on the president’s involvement in spending legislation since his second term’s start. The Constitution gives Congress – not the president – the authority to determine how the federal government is funded. Trump, Vought and DOGE (which stands for Department of Government Efficiency) have sought to test that separation of powers by refusing to spend, or impounding, large sums of congressionally approved funding.
The administration has unilaterally blocked more than $425 billion in spending mandated by Congress, according to figures released by Democrats on Congress’s appropriations committees.
“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,” Vought wrote in a letter recommending the cuts to Trump. “In addition, federal spending on CPB subsidizes a public media system that is politically biased and is an unnecessary expense to the taxpayer.”
Tuesday’s request encourages the Republican-controlled Congress to endorse Trump’s plans to sharply downsize the federal government. Though the scale of the savings would be relatively small, Trump and his allies have alleged that many of the targeted agencies and programs are wasteful and have baselessly accused others of carrying out a partisan, left-wing agenda.
Shortly after he took office, Trump halted the flow of funding to USAID, a division of the State Department that administers global health, anti-hunger, disease prevention and economic development programs. But Congress never endorsed those actions, leading to arguments that the moves were illegal, as well as some unfavorable court rulings.
In recent weeks, Trump has also attempted to block congressionally approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, though its affiliated news organizations draw significant funding from private donations.
NPR sued to halt that executive order, calling it “textbook retaliation” by the Trump administration over journalistic coverage it finds unfavorable.
“After linking arms with Elon Musk to take a chainsaw to key programs the American people count on, President Trump is now asking Republicans in Congress to rubber-stamp his DOGE cuts and codify them into law,” Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. “No way.”
The measure could move rapidly through Congress. The House can quickly bring the package to the floor for approval, and in the Senate the legislation does not need to clear the 60-vote threshold to head off a Democratic filibuster.
“These first DOGE cuts target taxpayer-funded public broadcasters notorious for their liberal bias like NPR and PBS, as well as billions in wasteful foreign aid dollars,” the House Freedom Caucus, a band of archconservative lawmakers, said in a statement. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda.”
Cutting foreign aid has been a popular idea for decades, with 60 percent of Americans saying the U.S. spends too much on assistance to other countries, according to the 2024 General Social Survey, a figure that has only once dropped below a majority since 1972.
Foreign assistance makes up a very small share of federal spending. The government obligated $59 billion to global aid in fiscal 2024, or 0.88 percent of the $6.7 trillion in total government spending in the same period.
Certain types of aid are more popular: In an April Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, 62 percent of Americans opposed freezing food, health and disease prevention services to people in poor countries.
A March Pew Research Center poll found that more Americans said the federal government should continue to fund NPR and PBS (43 percent) rather than remove federal funding (24 percent), and 33 percent said they were not sure. A larger 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents supported ending federal funding for NPR and PBS, while 69 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents opposed cuts.
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Scott Clement, Emily Guskin and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
