President Donald Trump asked Congress on Tuesday to rescind more than $9 billion in funding it already approved for public broadcasters, foreign aid and global health efforts, taking aim at those initiatives as “wasteful” and “woke.”
The requested cuts are part of a process known as rescission, in which the president can ask Congress to remove funding commitments from the budget.
“They have 45 days to codify these massive cuts to woke, wasteful, and weaponized spending via a simple majority vote,” the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
The single biggest cut Trump is requesting is a $1.1 billion funding commitment to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS. Leaders of both news outlets said the rescission would strip Americans of vital sources of information while cutting very little in costs.
“This rescission would have a negligible impact on reducing the deficit and provide little-to-no savings for taxpayers, yet it would harm all Americans, shutting off access to local news, national reporting, music and regional culture, and emergency alerting,” NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher said in a lengthy statement.
