This morning in the wee hours, following approval by the Senate on Thursday night, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to claw back $9 billion in funding for foreign aid. The bill had been approved by the Senate on Thursday night and will be signed into law by President Donald Trump later today. According to the medical journal Lancet, the funding loss is so catastrophic that it could cause more than 14 million excess deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children younger than five.
The $9 billion for the now-defunct United States Agency for International Development, which was previously allocated by Congress, had been illegally cut by the Department of Government Efficiency and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the administration apparently wanted the Republican Congress to share responsibility for the ruinous decision — and they were eager to do so. With only a couple of defectors in each chamber, the “pro-life” GOP happily signed on to the suffering of millions of people around the world. Not one Democrat voted for it.
With only a couple of defectors in each chamber, the “pro-life” GOP happily signed on to the suffering of millions of people around the world. Not one Democrat voted for it.
Republicans used an arcane provision of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which was enacted in the wake of budgetary abuses by Richard Nixon, another imperial president who routinely impounded funding simply because he didn’t like laws that he himself had signed. Nixon claimed then — as the Trump administration claims now —that although the Constitution might say that Congress has the responsibility to appropriate funds, nothing says the president has to spend it. This practice was taken to court repeatedly and Nixon lost each time, including one unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court.
Congress finally decided to step in by passing the ICA, which established the independent Congressional Budget Office to give unbiased, nonpartisan budget analysis, define the procedures by which the president could propose rescissions of funds and deferrals of them to a later date, and allow Congress to override the president’s proposals. The legislation mandated that Congress must act upon a rescission request within 45 days or it was null, and historically, a lot of them never saw the light of day.
Congress used to fiercely protect its budgetary authority. Now its GOP members mostly seem interested in appearing on Fox News and groveling for Trump.
As HuffPost reported, rescission is a favorite hobby horse of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget — and primary author of Project 2025 — whose self-proclaimed primary goal is to “put [federal workers] in trauma.” His apparent taste for political sadism is now to extending beyond the government to millions of other people around the world. Vought is even pushing the idea of so-called “pocket rescissions,” an unethical and legally dubious shortcut in which the president submits a request for a funding cut late in the year so the funding would expire before the 45 days is up.
Vought has also voiced his willingness to simply ignore the ICA altogether. In fact, he already did so once during Trump’s first term, when Vought agreed to withhold military funding for Ukraine, which Trump used in his attempt to extort President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in that infamous “perfect phone call.” It got Trump impeached, but that hasn’t stopped Vought from continuing to insist the president has no obligation under the Constitution to follow the law.
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According to HuffPost, Vought commented at a recent Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters that he sees no reason to even try to accomplish anything in a bipartisan manner. He stipulated that his office will “only work with House and Senate Democratic appropriators ‘if they conduct themselves with decorum.'” Since he knows the MAGA zombies in Congress will blindly walk off of any cliff Trump tells them to, that’s not a problem.
The handwriting is on the wall. Congressional Republicans passed their massive giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of working families on a party line vote in Trump’s One Big Boondoggle Bill, legislation that adds $3 trillion to the deficit and gives lie to Vought’s passionate paeans to “fiscal responsibility.” He just wants to cut programs that help people, because he apparently doesn’t believe in that. (Citing the administration’s massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health, Vought told reporters at the breakfast that he’s “having fun.”)
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Trump shares Vought’s philosophy, even as the president tries to portray himself as a leader who cares. (Why, just this week, he announced that he’s forcing Coca-Cola to use real cane sugar in their drinks!) And with millions of lives on the line around the world, congressional Republicans clearly showed they don’t possess the slightest concern for people’s welfare.
