Congress is quietly rejecting almost all of the deepest cuts to federal programs that President Trump requested for this year, turning back his efforts to slash funding for foreign aid, global health programs, scientific research, the arts and more in a bipartisan repudiation of his spending plans.
The latest rejection of his budget blueprint came on Wednesday, after the House voted 341 to 79 to pass a pair of bills to fund the State and Treasury Departments, as well as other foreign aid programs, providing money for agencies that Mr. Trump had proposed eliminating entirely.
All told, while lawmakers have agreed to make modest trims to a number of programs that Mr. Trump has wanted to eviscerate — and to zero out some others — the spending bills that they are now moving through Congress reflect the political reality that any funding measure must be bipartisan in order to avoid a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and become law.
“These are bills that reject the devastating cuts Trump demanded in his deeply unserious budget he sent to Congress about a year ago,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “When just about every secretary came before our Appropriations Committee to advocate for those Trump funding cuts, I made clear to them I planned to rip up his budget and write a new one — and that is exactly what we are doing.”
It is a striking pivot just months after the partisan clash last fall that led to the longest government shutdown in history.
Lawmakers are now in the process of negotiating and approving a series of spending bills before a Jan. 30 shutdown deadline. Appropriators in both the House and the Senate have come to bipartisan agreements on eight of the 12 bills that fund the government. The Senate was racing to clear three measures that passed the House last week with money for the Commerce and Justice Departments, as well as for environmental programs.
Even some programs that have long been despised by conservatives are instead set to sustain only modest cuts, including Voice of America, the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The legislation to fund the State Department and other foreign assistance programs alone provides over $19 billion more than Mr. Trump’s request — though it would constitute a cut of $9 billion below current levels.
Voice of America, the federal news network the Trump administration has sought to dismantle, is set to receive about $653 million, half a billion more than what Mr. Trump requested to “support the orderly shutdown” of the agency. Lawmakers had previously provided $867 million to the broadcaster.
“There’s a long history of international aid being viewed as an effective tool on a bipartisan basis, and I think that this bill re-establishes that bipartisan foundation,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the top Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing funding for the State Department and foreign aid programs.
House and Senate negotiators also rejected a proposal advanced by the White House to cancel $16.5 billion in previously approved funding for the Internal Revenue Service that Democrats included in 2022 in their sprawling climate and domestic policy law.
And they endorsed keeping scientific funding levels at the National Science Foundation and at NASA essentially flat, making only slight trims rather than the major cuts the White House had proposed.
In some ways, the spending bills confirm the worst fears of conservatives on Capitol Hill, who have worried that even with a Republican governing trifecta, they would be unable to enact the kind of major spending cuts they have long agitated for.
Those lawmakers had argued that the unilateral actions taken by the Department of Government Efficiency early last year to cancel congressionally appropriated programs were necessary to bypass the bipartisan agreements that typically fuel spending legislation and bring about the steep reductions to programs Republicans have long targeted.
The National Endowment for Democracy, said Representative Eric Burlison, Republican of Missouri, is “a program that Elon Musk, while leading DOGE, said publicly was a scam; that it was rife with corruption and an evil organization that should be dissolved.”
“President Trump and his administration attempted to do that, and yet here we are trying to fund it,” Mr. Burlison said. The House rejected an amendment to eliminate funding for the nonprofit in a 291-to-127 vote.
Some Democrats also are unhappy with the emerging spending package, believing that their party should use the leverage it has in the appropriations process to try to rein in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That could still emerge as a sticking point to a final agreement; the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security is among the toughest to negotiate and has yet to be agreed upon.
But overall, the bipartisan consensus around the spending measures is strong. Republican leaders who helped negotiate them championed the trims in the spending bills, arguing that the overall reduction in funding compared with last year’s levels constituted a major win.
And they noted that the bills represented a return to the practice of writing and passing individual spending bills, rather than lumping all 12 together into a behemoth package, or enacting an emergency stopgap measure to keep funding flat.
“Difficulty is what separates serious legislating from political convenience,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee.
Whether the administration ultimately spends the money that lawmakers appropriate is still an unanswered question. Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, has made clear that he believes the president has the authority to disregard congressional directives in order to spend less money than lawmakers approved.
And members of Congress omitted language they had considered including in the legislation aimed at limiting Mr. Trump’s ability to circumvent them. For instance, lawmakers ultimately jettisoned language that senators had tucked into the bill to fund the Commerce and Justice Departments that would have required administration officials to notify lawmakers 30 days before canceling federal contracts or enacting mass layoffs of federal employees.
That provision also would have restricted agencies’ ability to use funds approved for one purpose for another, a maneuver known as “reprogramming.” Some Democrats argued such measures were futile and potentially unnecessary since Mr. Trump would be less likely to unilaterally cancel spending approved by Republicans that he had signed into law himself.
“If they’re going to violate the underlying statute, then passing a new statute that says they have to abide by the old one is silliness,” Mr. Schatz said. “I also think that it’s a little harder for them to send rescissions packages, and to do great violence to the agencies, if this is a bill passed by Republicans in Congress and signed by the Republican president.”
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
The post Congress Is Spurning Many of Trump’s Proposed Spending Cuts appeared first on New York Times.
