OPINION:
Senate moderates are having a bad week. They are feeling the squeeze from the public and the White House over a bill that would claw back a thin slice of the pork they have been shoveling into the federal budget. Already, the squishes are howling about a mere 0.13% cut.
Through a budgetary process known as rescissions, previously enacted spending can be deleted with a simple majority vote: 50 in the Senate with the vice president’s help. The deadline is Friday.
Last month, the House narrowly approved a $9.4 billion list of reductions. If adopted, it would withdraw cash from foreign aid programs at the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and Institute of Peace. It would also slash the PBS subsidy.
President Trump determined that supporting nongovernmental organizations that flood the United States with illegal aliens isn’t in line with his “America First” agenda. It’s equally senseless for taxpayers to underwrite “Sesame Street” and slanted public news broadcasts so “viewers like you” are relieved of having to pay for what they enjoy.
On the Senate floor, Sen. Maria Cantwell explained that we must keep sending welfare checks to Big Bird because that’s the only way people know about looming storms. “It’s a reckless endangerment of 13 million Americans who depend on these stations for lifesaving emergency information,” the Washington Democrat said.
She speaks as if the internet, television, satellite, cellphones and the National Weather Service’s weather radio network don’t already exist to provide such warnings. The weather radio service even covers most of her home state, highlighting the disconnect between leftist claims and reality.
When the Department of Government Efficiency visited the federally financed Institute of Peace, auditors encountered physical resistance from the agency’s leadership and staff. They also discovered that the agency had its own weapons cache. Just because it has “peace” in its name doesn’t mean that’s what the organization is all about.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, a master of details, outlined in recent congressional testimony the outrageous expenditures cloaked by innocuous titles in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
“Under the guise of so-called ‘preventative care’ within the PEPFAR program, Americans have been funding … $800,000 for ‘transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks’ in Nepal … [and] $3.6 million for LGBTQ activism, free training in pastry cooking, ‘psychosocial counseling,’ a cyber cafe, and dance focus groups for male prostitutes in Haiti.”
Many of the usual suspects in the Republican caucus are hesitant to cut PEPFAR, apparently unable to stop handing taxpayer assistance to jitterbugging gentlemen of the evening in exotic locales. They are just as unwilling to give up their sponsorship of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Mr. Trump is fed up with wasting money on anti-American causes. “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or endorsement,” he wrote on Truth Social.
If the world’s greatest deliberative body lacks the fortitude to trim the slimmest possible amount from the annual appropriations, then there’s no hope they will be able to resolve the near-$2 trillion deficit on their own.
The reckless refusal of the likes of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, to accept rescissions will force Mr. Vought to implement plan B, which includes impounding funds, citing a constitutional authority every president has wielded until the Watergate era.
Ms. Murkowski won’t like an alternative likely to eliminate all pork now being funneled into the Last Frontier.
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