Headline Roundup • July 17th, 2025
Senate Approves $9 Billion in Cuts to Foreign Aid, NPR, PBS
Summary from the AllSides News Team
The Senate has passed a bill to reduce $9 billion from previously approved funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting, including funds for NPR (Lean Left bias) and PBS (Lean Left).
The Details: The legislation, backed by President Donald Trump, was opposed by two Republican senators (Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) who cited concerns over surrendering congressional control over federal spending. The majority of the funds in question, roughly $8 billion, were meant for foreign assistance programs. The remaining $1.1 billion was for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds NPR and PBS.
Key Quotes: "It's a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue," Senate Majority Leader John Thune said before the final vote. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said, “We have never, never before seen bipartisan investments slashed through a partisan rescissions package,”“Do not start now. Not when we are working, at this very moment, in a bipartisan way to pass our spending bills. Bipartisanship doesn’t end with any one line being crossed; it erodes. It breaks down bit by bit, until one day there is nothing left.”
For Context: The decision follows a push by the White House, primarily through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to expand the executive branch’s control over federal spending, a power that the Constitution confers to the legislative branch. The bill will now move to the House for a vote.
How the Media Covered It: Fox News (Right bias) singled out the two Republican senators who opposed the bill. BBC (Center) wrote that the CPB "funds NPR and PBS as well as radio stations on which many rural Americans rely." The New York Times (Lean Left) emphasized the broader implications for congressional spending power and the potential consequences for future bipartisan negotiations to fund the government. NPR said motions by the Democrats to carve out funding for PBS and NPR were mostly "symbolic" since the Republicans had the numbers.
Revised by the AllSides staff (of humans) after a first draft from our custom AI. Learn more. Suggest an improvement to this summary.
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The US Senate has passed a bill that seeks to cut $9bn (£6.7bn) from funds previously approved for spending by Congress, including cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid.
The 51-48 vote happened just before dawn on Thursday, following an hours-long overnight "vote-a-rama", as the Republican-led Senate negotiated amendments.
The bill - a so-called rescissions package that allows Congress to claw back approved funding - is part of a larger effort to reduce federal spending by President Donald Trump.
It now returns to the House of Representatives, the lower chamber...
Though Senate Republicans were successful in their mission to pass President Donald Trump’s clawback package, not every member of the conference was on board.
Only two Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, joined with every Senate Democrat to vote against the $9 billion package geared toward clawing back foreign aid and public broadcasting funding.
Senate Republican leaders had hoped that stripping $400 million in cuts to Bush-era international AIDS and HIV prevention funding could win over all the holdouts, both public and private. But the lawmakers who voted against the...
The Senate early on Thursday morning approved a White House request to claw back $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting, as Republicans bowed to President Trump in an unusual surrender of congressional spending power.
The 51-to-48 vote came over the objections of two Republicans, who argued that their party was ceding Congress’s constitutional control over federal funding. The Republicans who opposed the measure were Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
The bulk of the funds targeted — about $8 billion — was for foreign...
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