The U.S. Senate passed a bill that cuts around $9 billion from funds for public broadcasting and foreign aid. That represents cutting 0.1% of the $6.75 trillion in federal spending from a budget with a $2 trillion deficit.
And these were the easy cuts.
Republicans have been clamoring for decades to cut foreign aid and stop funding public broadcasting. Still, the vote was 51-48 with two GOP senators defecting. This shows the obstacles to cutting enough government spending to make a dent in the federal budget deficit, much less start the process of bringing down the national debt.
The primary obstacle to cutting federal spending is the American people. We’ve become drunk on federal dollars. While hundreds of billions of tax dollars go to funding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, there are tens of thousands of federal grants and payouts earmarked for neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities, and states to fund everything from playgrounds to infrastructure improvements.
Many of these grants are less than a million dollars, and most are under $10 million. Although most grants may originate as federal dollars, they are dispensed by local and state governments.
People depend on these programs for everything from nutrition to childcare. Cutting them requires something that politicians at every level refuse to do: making choices.
Some of the choices politicians are being asked to make are easy. Some aren’t. But both parties refuse to face up to their responsibility to manage our fiscal affairs.
Instead, they simply give everyone everything they want. Not the way to run a great country.
If it were simply a matter of taking a red pen to the budget and scratching out “wasteful programs,” it would be a lot easier. For example, America First Legal came up with a list of 4,400 DEI programs funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
/1🚨EXPOSED — The Left is suing to reinstate Biden’s DEI grants, calling it “discrimination” to stop funding race-based woke research.
But here’s what NIH really terminated:
A pipeline of radical, discriminatory junk science.
We read all 4,400 grants. Here’s what we found…🧵 pic.twitter.com/T3rTHOFddl
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) July 16, 2025
Reason.com:
The difficulty that Republicans faced in getting even just $9 billion in spending cuts to this point (where we still don’t know if the bill will pass) reveals the Sisyphean task facing anyone who would like to see the federal budget brought closer to balancing. Federal spending has grown from about $5 trillion a decade ago to nearly $7 trillion this year, and trying to roll back even a fraction of that total is enough to get every Democrat and a few Republicans uneasy.
In the context of the $7 trillion federal budget, this $9 billion cut amounts to a little more than one-tenth of one percent. In other words, if the entire federal budget were a $100 bill, the rescission package would be equal to cutting 13 cents.
Democrats treat the budget (except defense spending) as holy writ. They see it as a sacrilege to cut anything. And when the attempts at cutting programs that even just tangentially affect anyone but white, rich people, the screams of agony are something to behold.
The reckoning is coming. Make no mistake.
Editor’s Note: Radical leftist judges are doing everything they can to hamstring President Trump’s agenda to make America great again.
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