Congress
House clears $9.4B in funding clawbacks requested by White House
House Republicans have narrowly advanced a request from the White House to claw back $9.4 billion that lawmakers have already approved for public media and more than a dozen accounts across the State Department focused on foreign assistance.
The 214-212 vote is a major victory for President Donald Trump, who had been lobbying hard for lawmakers to pass the legislation, including in a social media post shortly before members went to the floor.
“For decades, Republicans have promised to cut NPR, but have never done it, until now,” Trump said, in part. “The Rescissions Bill is a NO BRAINER, and every single Republican in Congress should vote, ‘YES.’ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
It’s also a huge relief for Speaker Mike Johnson, who hours earlier was projecting cautious optimism that the package of funding cuts would pass despite knowing his margins were exceedingly narrow.
“We think we have the votes. We’re going ahead with it,” Johnson told reporters Thursday afternoon.
One “yes” vote: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who is known to frequently break with his party.
“First time I’ve ever seen us cut spending in my life. I would be ‘yea’ all day long,” Massie said in a brief interview earlier this week, previewing his support.
The final margin was narrow — as many as six Republicans had been recorded as opposing the bill; two of those ultimately changed their votes. Johnson and Whip Tom Emmer huddled with the holdouts on the House floor during the vote to try to sway them in favor of the measure; Budget Chair Jodey Arrington also touched base with multiple of the Republicans who had cast no votes.
The legislation would revoke $8.3 billion in foreign aid and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting. It faced opposition from some Republican lawmakers concerned about slashing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and how emergency alerts could be impacted by the public media cuts.
House Republican leadership and White House officials spent days trying to assuage the concerns of lawmakers worried that the clawbacks would hurt their local public broadcasting stations, emergency alert systems and efforts to prevent AIDS around the world.
In defense of cuts to public broadcasting, senior GOP lawmakers argued that the local PBS affiliates in their home states do good work but that those in some other states air inappropriate programming.
“These stations are some of the most partisan stations out there. Can you imagine if a conservative station was funded? The left would have screamed, vilified and exterminated it a long while ago,” said Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), during floor debate.
Democrats countered that’s a lie. “That’s BS. It’s total BS,” Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s top Democratic appropriator, said in a brief interview. “These comments that it’s ‘woke’ in this state or that — what the hell do you know? Nothing.”
Still, there are discussions underway among many appropriators that they could try to offset some of these slashes in upcoming spending bills, since the funding cuts won’t impact accounts until after the new fiscal year kicks in come October 1.
“I am concerned about the future of trying to do away with public television. I’m a supporter of public television in Idaho, they do a fantastic job,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, who ultimately voted in favor of the bill.
The package now heads to the Senate, where Republicans are discussing whether they can amend it – despite the complicated mechanics for doing so. The rescissions process was created under the decades-old law enacted to block presidents from withholding federal cash Congress has already approved.
The Senate also has the option to approve sections of the package piecemeal and reject others. That’s what Congress did back in 1995 when the House and Senate approved a rescissions package that clawed back less funding than then-President Bill Clinton had requested to cut. But doing that would send it back to the House, where passage a second time may not be guaranteed.
Congress has until midnight on July 18 to act on the legislation, otherwise the proposal will expire and the White House is required to spend the money as lawmakers intended.
Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton raised $18 million in the third quarter of 2026 across his campaign and his joint fundraising committees, his campaign tells Blue Light News, a significant haul for the homestretch of the election.
Paxton’s number is double his $9 million second-quarter total, and signals Republican donors are rallying behind their Texas nominee. The campaign did not provide a current cash-on-hand total.
Democrat James Talarico’s campaign has yet to release his fundraising totals for the quarter. He raised $30 million last quarter.
“We now have the resources to make sure every Texan sees Talarico’s radical record between now and Election Day,” said Nick Maddux, senior adviser to the Paxton campaign.
The past quarter — the first full reporting period after Paxton’s primary runoff victory in May — saw Republicans flock to Texas for their midterm convention, which featured pro-Paxton fundraisers on the sidelines. Last week, the Paxton campaign announced a massive $20 million ad buy across the state, one of the largest-ever single media investments in a Texas Senate race.
Paxton needs the money: In a recording of a private donor event last month shared with POLITICO, he said he has “never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign,” pointing to influence “from D.C.”
Texas has emerged as a huge money suck for Senate Republicans, who have poured tens of millions into the state to aid Paxton. Senate Leadership Fund, their top super PAC, has spent or reserved well over $100 million in the state to date, and the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. and its affiliates plan to spend near $45 million in the state through Oct. 12.
Paxton has acknowledged that money has changed the race’s narrative: In a recording of a private donor event last monthshared with POLITICO, he said he has “never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign,” pointing to influence “from D.C.”
Most recent public polling shows Talarico with a small lead in the race in spite of the recent onslaught in GOP spending, though Paxton’s campaign released an internal poll last week showing Paxton leading by three points.
Sen. Raphael Warnock is hitting the road for the last month before Election Day.
The Georgia Democrat’s final midterm campaign surrogate sprint will only increase chatter around the possibility that he might run for president in 2028, according to a nine-stop itinerary shared first with Blue Light News.
First, he’ll touch down in New Hampshire on Tuesday before hitting Nevada on Wednesday. Next, he’ll travel to South Carolina (Oct. 13), Mississippi (Oct. 14), North Carolina (Oct. 15), South Carolina (Oct. 16-17), Michigan (Oct. 20-21), Wisconsin (Oct. 23) and Ohio (Oct. 24-26).
“Senator Reverend Warnock will be hitting the trail to energize voters who are sick of the President enriching himself while ordinary people continue to pay more for everything,” a spokesperson told Playbook. “Tapping into the righteous anger that voters are feeling across the country, the pastor in the Senate will again make the campaign trail his pulpit: calling out Trump’s corruption, while leaving voters hopeful for the next generation of Democratic leadership.”
Asked recently at the Texas Tribune Festival about whether he would run for president, Warnock said: “We’ll see what happens.”
Democrats are eager to win back subpoena power if they retake Congress, but they’re split on how hard they’ll go after corporate America.
The party is united by the idea of aggressive oversight of President Donald Trump’s administration, which will help shape their messaging in the run-up to the 2028 election. But Democrats are at odds over how fiercely to use their probing power to go after the corporations, law firms and universities that courted the White House over the past two years.
“We don’t want to turn into a banana republic where you lose an election and it’s all about retribution,” Rep. Bill Foster, a senior member of the Financial Services Committee, said.
“We’re going to have to be a little bit wise about when companies simply did something they had to do to survive this unprecedented level of corruption, compared to companies that actually got on board and profited more by being a partner in his corruption,” he added.
Some progressives counter that a restrained approach would sit uneasily with the party’s base.
“It would be political suicide for Democrats to campaign on fighting corruption and then turn around and go easy on the very companies that are facilitating it,” said Ella Fanger, corporate power policy adviser at the liberal nonprofit group Demand Progress.
Prime targets for some Democrats are the tech companies that have taken steps to be on the president’s good side, like Apple, Amazon and Meta, which have all donated to Trump’s ballroom effort. Major cryptocurrency players, including Coinbase, Ripple and Tether also chipped in for the ballroom, and will be subject to questioning from Democrats.
The late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s networks and associates are also poised for probes — a push that has ensnared big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America in the past.
Sen. Chris Murphy said the party should focus on the nexus between Trump and corporate corruption.
“We should get to the bottom of the corrupt relationship that exists between corporations in this country and the Trump administration,” Murphy said, pointing to questions he’s posed about a tobacco company’s donation to Trump’s super PAC before new e-cigarette rules were unveiled.
Still, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who serves on Senate Banking, warned against the weaponization of power.
“Our focus should be solving problems that we’re seeing happening,” she said, pointing to cost-of-living issues around health care, housing and energy.
What else we’re watching:
— FIRST IN IC: BUILD AMERICA CAUCUS AGENDA — Energized by progress on permitting and housing legislation this term, a bipartisan development-focused caucus is rolling out a detailed agenda for next term. The 40-member Build America Caucus is releasing a 95-page package of proposals, first shared with Blue Light News, that outlines plans touching on health care, transportation, child care and research. The group launched last year with the goal of cutting red tape and regulatory bottlenecks to spur development.
— AI COLLAB STILL ILLUSIVE FOR CRUZ, CANTWELL — Commerce Chair Ted Cruz and ranking member Maria Cantwell might still be celebrating Senate passage of their landmark college sports bill last week, but it’s unclear the momentum will carry forward to agreement on another committee priority: artificial intelligence. Among the dozen lawmakers, aides and industry experts who spoke to Blue Light News, few expect the two senators to shed their well-established ideologies and styles after the mutual win. That could doom their ability to replicate their latest achievement in something as complex and divisive as an AI regulatory framework.
Jasper Goodman, Katherine Hapgood, Riley Rogerson and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.
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