White House sending Congress a bill to claw back taxpayer dollars from NPR, PBS, USAID

The White House will soon send Congress a package of $9.4 billion in cuts to current federal spending, including NPR and PBS and a chunk of foreign aid from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Department of Government Efficiency identified the cuts, which consist of $8.3 billion from foreign aid and $1.1 billion from NPR and PBS, which are funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The clawback would virtually eliminate taxpayer support for the CPB, except for services such as Amber alerts and tornado warnings.

CPB declined to comment on plans to cancel its funding.

The package, known as rescissions legislation, would cancel spending previously approved by Congress. With Elon Musk’s exit, President Trump vowed that DOGE would continue to downsize the federal bureaucracy by identifying wasteful and fraudulent spending for proposed elimination.

Democrats say the cuts would wipe out valuable services and harm Americans and U.S. interests abroad. They say slashing CPB funding was an attack on free speech.

Conservatives have long railed against the liberal bias of the taxpayer-supported NPR and PBS, as well as foreign aid programs that they say push woke policies.

Still, Republican deficit hawks scoffed at Mr. Trump’s $9.4 billion package of permanent cuts to federal spending, despite DOGE’s slashing nearly $200 billion from the current accounts.

“We’re totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent. … Most of it is going to come later,” Mr. Trump said Friday at an Oval Office press conference where he bade farewell to Mr. Musk as a special White House employee.

The president said the rescissions package was just the first bite of the DOGE cuts and that more would come in the Big Beautiful Bill Act and other spending measures.

“We’re going to have it codified by Congress,” the president said. “It’s hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Congressional Republicans are eager to take up the $9.4 billion in cuts, which the House and Senate can pass without the votes of any Democrat.

Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said the House is “ready to act on DOGE’s findings so we can deliver even more cuts to big government that Mr. Trump wants and the American people demand.”

The White House’s formal transmission of the rescissions package to Congress will trigger a 45-day clock for lawmakers to either adopt or reject the package. The White House is confident it will pass both chambers, unlike Mr. Trump’s 2018 rescission plan, which failed narrowly in the Senate.

Last week, NPR CEO Katherine Maher and three Colorado public radio stations sued the administration over Mr. Trump’s order to cut funding from NPR and PBS.

Republican lawmakers questioned Ms. Maher when she appeared before the House’s DOGE panel in March. She was scrutinized for social media posts in 2020 in which she called Mr. Trump “a fascist and a deranged racist sociopath.”

“I regret those tweets,” she said. “I would not tweet them again today. They represented a time where I was reflecting on something that I believe the president had said, rather than who he is. I don’t presume that anyone is a racist.”

NPR requested and received a $1.9 million grant commitment from CPB to hire more editors and journalists in October to fill 11 positions to help the outlet adhere “to the highest standards of editorial integrity — accuracy, fairness, balance, objectivity, and transparency, and the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.”

However, Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans were already preparing to pull funds from PBS and NPR. Mr. Trump told reporters that both outlets were “very biased” and a “waste of money.”

The White House also cites programs that promote a liberal agenda, such as PBS’s “Real Boy,” a documentary about a transgender teen, and “Our League,” a show about a transgender woman returning to her hometown.

The remaining $8.3 billion from the rescissions package will be cut from foreign aid at the State Department, primarily within USAID, such as $882,000 for social media mentorship in Serbia and Belarus, $5 million for “green transportation and logistics,” $333,000 for promoting tourism in the Caucasus, $750,000 for reducing xenophobia in Venezuela and $638,000 for media activity in Belarus.

Other cuts at USAID include:

• $167,000 for free education and health care in Ecuador and Venezuela.

• $889,000 for electoral reforms and voter education in Kenya.

• $1 million for voter ID in Haiti.

• $33,000 for “Being LGBTI in the Caribbean.”

• $643,000 for LGBTQ programs in the Western Balkans.

• $567,000 for LGBTQ programs in Uganda.

• $8,000 for promoting vegan food in Zambia.

• $500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda.

• $4 million for legume systems research.

• $67,000 for feeding insect powder to children in Madagascar.

• $6 million for “Net Zero Cities” in Mexico.

• $3 million for “Iraqi Sesame Street.”

• $4 million for “sedentary migrants” in Colombia.

• $1 million for programs to strengthen the resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer global movements.

• $6 million for supporting media organizations and the civic life of Palestinians.

• $2.5 million for teaching young children how to make environmentally friendly “reproductive health” decisions.

• $614,700 for climate adaptation, including growing coral reefs in the Caribbean.

• $595,400 for training of women in gender equity.

• $716,000 for the training of citizen journalists.

• $1.2 million for the “Afrobarometer public opinion survey.”

• $100,000 for Harvard to conduct research models for peace.

• $100,000 for New York University to analyze democracy field experiments in South Sudan.

• $77,000 for the University of Denver for “Escaping the Ethnic Trap in Deeply Divided Societies.”

The package makes cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, including:

• $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies and condoms in Zambia.

• $5.1 million to strengthen the “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements.”

• $833,000 for services for “transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks” in Nepal.

The USAID cuts also take $22 million from the African Development Foundation for programs such as graphic design training in Nigeria and the African Hive Camping and Tours to create adventure trips for backpackers.