Conservatives are urging the Senate to pass a budget-cutting package that protects taxpayers from having to fund “egregiously wrong, egregiously wasteful, fraudulent and abusive” programs — including biased public media, the promotion of transgender extremism overseas, and an experiment that feeds ground-up insects to children.

The House of Representatives passed the Rescissions Act of 2025 (H.R. 4) on Thursday, 214-212. The $9.4 billion budget-saving measure now goes to the Senate.

Nearly $1.1 billion of the savings comes from defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the parent of National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting System (PBS). The package cancels the CPB’s entire $535 million appropriation for two successive fiscal years.

“NPR, make no mistake, is a political arm of the Democrat[ic] Party, funded by your tax dollars,” Rep. Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” shortly after the vote.

Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) told The Washington Stand Thursday he felt overjoyed the House voted to defund NPR’s “taxpayer-funded circuses of woke insanity.”

“From the moment NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher exposed herself as a dishonest, left-wing activist … I vowed to spend all of my time ensuring that NPR never gets another cent of taxpayer funding. That day is finally here,” Gill told TWS. A video of Gill grilling Maher went viral shortly after the March 26 DOGE Subcommittee hearing. “State-sponsored media has no place in America,” he said.

On Thursday, Democrats attempted to portray thoroughly left-leaning public broadcasting — which featured a story about gun clubs comprised of transgender activists shortly before the Nashville Christian school shooting — as family-friendly. “Republicans are attacking Elmo!” exclaimed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), hoisting a red plush doll of the Muppet over the House floor. But Warner Bros. Discovery opted not to continue airing “Sesame Street” on HBO, which acquired the right to air first-run episodes in 2015. Netflix recently brokered a deal to air new episodes on Netflix and PBS simultaneously.

The vote to defund public broadcasting came days after “Sesame Street” posted a social media message celebrating Pride Month. 

Experts called the House’s swift passage “a milestone” accomplishment. “The last time the House voted to defund NPR was in 1997, and the motion got only 78 votes,” noted Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation, who testified against taxpayer-funded public broadcasting. “Every Republican President since LBJ created the CPB in 1967 has tried to defund public broadcasting and failed. Donald Trump is getting it done.”

Aside from defunding NPR, the rescissions package eliminates $900 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development, cuts which surgically targeted “USAID funding for drag shows, DEI, and other woke ideology projects,” said Houchin. “I’m so grateful to the DOGE Committee [for] look[ing] at some of the [grants] that were egregiously wrong — egregiously wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive. I’m glad that we passed this rescissions package today, so that we can begin to restore sanity and fiscal responsibility within our systems of government.”

The White House observed that USAID’s activities often “interfere with the sovereignty of other countries,” as well.

Sometimes, USAID programs manipulate American sovereignty, as well. Often, left-wing grantmakers in the federal government will finance pilot programs abroad, then cite those programs to build momentum toward radicalizing U.S. policy, said Houchin. “It’s not advancing American values. It’s advancing far-left values.”

Among the many additional examples of offensive or wasteful spending, the rescissions package eliminates:

• $135 million for the World Health Organization.
• $5.1 million for “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements.”
• $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia.
• $1.2 million to promote the LGBTQ+ lifestyle in such socially conservative regions as the Caribbean, the western Balkans, and Uganda.
• $67,000 for testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar.

Congress had to excise offensive spending, because a “large number of federal grants are UBI for left-wing activists,” said Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum. 

Congressional experts say legislators frequently hide extreme social advocacy under benign-sounding programs. “‘Family planning’ and ‘reproductive health’ are well-established euphemisms for abortion and abortifacient contraceptives that target the unborn,” declared an FRC letter to Congress ahead of the vote. “LGBT identities are undefined, fluid, and intentionally expansive, so enshrining them in other nations’ nondiscrimination law is never justified in principle, is invasive, causes tangible harms, is coercive, and cannot be reconciled with religious liberty.”

President Trump’s “proposed rescission of $400 million to Global Health Programs (H.R. 4 Sec. 2(b)(6)) specifically ‘would eliminate only those programs that neither provide life-saving treatment nor support American interests,’” it continued. “FRC has long documented the abuses of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to push a radical social agenda abroad, particularly with regard to funding abortion and promoting LGBT ideology.” The Senate and White House alike have previewed potentially reducing PEPFAR cuts.

In the end, the package, which endured pervasively negative media coverage, relied on every single vote. “I’m glad that the Republicans in the House got it done,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “This Week on Capitol Hill,” hosted by Perkins. “Not a single Democrat participated in any of that, and I think the voters are watching.”

Not all Republicans took part in the razor-thin victory. Four members of the Republican caucus voted against the White House rescissions package: Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada, co-chair of the Public Broadcasting Caucus; Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; Nicole Malliotakis of New York; and Mike Turner of Ohio.

“Every time the media count us out, said something can’t be done, we prove them wrong,” said Houchin. 

Created by the Watergate-era Impoundment Control Act of 1974, rescissions let Congress reverse previous appropriations that have not yet been spent before its budgetary authority runs out. Senate Democrats cannot filibuster rescissions, thanks to the expedited process: Senate debate is limited to 10 hours, and the motion to proceed and the final vote both pass by a simple majority. The rescissions package is one of several bills to codify President Trump’s executive orders permanently which continue to linger in Congress.

The legislative victory for President Donald Trump, passed with strong support from the Speaker of the House, won praise from their frequent critics. “These are the first DOGE cuts. $9 billion won’t solve all our budget problems but it’s an incredible start. Let’s cut more,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a libertarian-leaning Republican frequently at odds with House leadership due to concerns about overspending. “Thank you DOGE!”

“Excellent work by the House. Let’s get this first rescissions package through the Senate!” said Jeremiah Mosteller, policy director of Americans for Prosperity, a group often at odds with the White House.

Budget hawks call on the Senate to step up passage of the bill which the House Freedom Caucus dubbed “the first rescissions package.”

“[M]ake no mistake,” the conservative group continued, “this is just the start. Now it goes to the Senate — they need to move swiftly. We need to codify DOGE cuts into law and undo decades of Washington’s wasteful spending.”

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) announced he had introduced the rescissions package in the Senate immediately after the House roll call. “It’s time for Congress to get serious about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in government,” said Schmitt. “The billions in rescissions will better align our spending with a true reform agenda promised to Americans.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) plans to let the rescissions package cool until July in favor of passing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (H.R. 1). “We’ll do reconciliation first, so I would expect that rescissions package probably will be a July timeframe,” said Thune.

Pro-family advocates say that debt added every day drives up the interest on the $37 trillion national debt and incurs an immense cost. “Our national debt is a moral issue as well as a fiscal issue,” said FRC’s letter to Capitol Hill. “If we continue to borrow and indebt future generations, there will be a day of reckoning.”