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Progressives, Democrats Vow Fight as Senate GOP Aims to Claw Back Billions in Federal Funding
Republicans plan to utilize a rare process called "rescission" to skirt Congress' power of the purse and illegally allow Trump to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding to critical programs.
Jul 10, 2025
The U.S. Senate will soon vote on whether President Donald Trump can claw back billions of dollars that have already been appropriated by Congress.
Last month, the House narrowly voted to allow Trump to rescind $9.4 billion in funds that were meant to fund global health initiatives—including AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis prevention—and public broadcasters like PBS and NPR.
It's far from the first time that this Republican-controlled Congress has voted on massive budget cuts, but progressive groups and some Democratic lawmakers say this vote has another frightening dimension to it.
These funds were among the more than $420 billion appropriated by Congress that Trump illegally impounded, or refused to spend, at the start of his term.
In a letter sent Wednesday to members of Congress, a coalition of more than 100 groups—including Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, and Greenpeace—warned that by voting to approve these rescissions of federal funds, they would be giving Trump tacit approval to unconstitutionally take away Congress' authority to spend money.
"This rescissions proposal does not ask Congress, as required by the Impoundment Control Act, to approve the entirety of the federal spending that has been illegally frozen by the Trump administration," the letter notes. "The administration is merely trying to establish a veil of legitimacy while it continues unconstitutional actions that it began more than 100 days ago."
The groups went on to warn that allowing the president to unilaterally cut funding that he doesn't approve of "risks irreparable damage to the regular bipartisan appropriations process."
"Despite the political back-and-forth, Congress eventually reaches a bipartisan agreement on government funding every year, one way or another," they said. "The basis for that bipartisan agreement is that both parties must agree to compromises to achieve any of their goals. If a party with a political trifecta can simply rescind funding for the parts of appropriations bills they compromised on, they undermine congressional checks and balances and the basis for future bipartisan dealmaking on an already politically fraught process."
Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, presidents are forbidden from unilaterally refusing to spend funds. However, Congress is allowed to pass a "rescission" bill within 45 days of canceling them if the president requests it.
Trump would be the first president since Bill Clinton in 1999 to successfully have funds rescinded by Congress, and it would be the largest rescission in four decades.
But as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, there is a key difference: "The administration illegally impounded the funds at issue for months before proposing the [rescission] package" and that it is "unlawfully withholding much larger amounts of funding that it has not proposed for rescission."
According to a tracker created by the office of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who sit on the House and Senate appropriations committees, respectively, the Trump administration is blocking congressionally appropriated funds for programs including:
- Research into Alzheimer's disease, women's health, cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses;
- Natural disaster relief;
- School lunch assistance for children;
- Early childhood education through the Head Start Program; and
- Birth control and cancer screenings for over 800,000 patients
Russell Vought, the head of the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has openly indicated a desire to use rescission to cut all of this spending "without having to get an affirmative vote" from Congress.
According to The New York Times, Vought is planning to use an even more arcane and illegal maneuver known as "pocket rescission" to avoid spending the funds. As Tony Romm reported in June:
Under the emerging plan, the Trump administration would wait until closer to Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, to formally ask lawmakers to claw back a set of funds it has targeted for cuts. Even if Congress fails to vote on the request, the president’s timing would trigger a law that freezes the money until it ultimately expires.
Some Senate Democrats have indicated they'd be willing to risk a government shutdown to prevent the rescission bill from passing.
In a letter published Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote that the prospect of the rescissions bill passing had "grave implications."
"[I]t is absurd for [Republicans] to expect Democrats to act as business as usual and engage in a bipartisan appropriations process to fund the government, while they concurrently plot to pass a purely partisan rescissions bill to defund those same programs negotiated on a bipartisan basis behind the scenes," Schumer wrote.
Murray called out Vought directly on Wednesday at a markup session on the next round of bills in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
"For us to be able to work in a bipartisan way effectively, that requires us to work with each other. To not just write bipartisan funding bills—but to defend them from partisan cuts sought by the president and the OMB director," she said during her opening remarks. "We cannot allow bipartisan funding bills with partisan rescission packages. It will not work."
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Dems Call for Investigation Into Trump NWS-FEMA Cuts After Texas Flood
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Jul 09, 2025
With at least 111 people confirmed dead and more than 150 still missing in Texas' catastrophic flooding as of Wednesday, Democrats in Congress are demanding answers about whether the Trump administration's cuts to federal weather monitoring and emergency management agencies may have hampered the response.
Since President Donald Trump retook office, his administration has unilaterally introduced cuts that have substantially reduced the number of employees at the National Weather Service (NWS) and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which forecast weather and collect environmental data. It has done the same to the Federal Emergency Management System (FEMA), which coordinates responses to natural disasters.
And following the passage of the GOP budget reconciliation package last week, further cuts to these agencies are in the works.
As the death count has climbed, Democrats in both the House and Senate have issued calls to investigate whether these cuts may have played a role in making the horrific situation in Texas worse.
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in a video posted to X Tuesday night. "We aren't doing our job if we aren't seeking answers to these questions."
Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut NOAA staff by 11% through a combination of terminations and buyouts. According to The Associated Press, this included "hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day."
FEMA, meanwhile has shed around 2,000 permanent employees, around a third of its permanent workforce.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed what she called "false claims" that Trump's cuts affected Texas' disaster response. Jackson said the National Weather Service "did their job, even issuing a flood watch more than 12 hours in advance." Jason Runyen, a meteorologist with the NWS, also told the AP that the NWS handling Austin and San Antonio had more forecasters on duty than normal.
However, questions still remain about how cuts may have affected other parts of the emergency response.
According to former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, who spoke to CNN on Tuesday, the problem was not the NWS forecasting, but the failure to disseminate warnings about the floods to the public.
"We need to understand why that last mile is where the problem was in terms of getting alerts out," Spinrad said.
According to the AP, the NWS office for Austin-San Antonio had six vacancies, including "a key manager responsible for issuing warnings and coordinating with local emergency management officials." That official, who'd held the position for 17 years, left in April after one of DOGE's mass emails urging federal workers to take early retirements.
In a Monday letter to Roderick Anderson, the Commerce Department's acting inspector general, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted reporting from The New York Times Saturday, which quoted several former NWS officials who said the response suffered from "the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight."
"The roles left unfilled are not marginal, they're critical," Schumer said. "These are the experts responsible for modeling storm impacts, monitoring rising water levels, issuing flood warnings, and coordinating directly with local emergency managers about when to warn the public and issue evacuation orders."
Schumer called on the inspector general to begin investigating why these positions were vacant and whether it affected the emergency response or forecasting.
In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) urged against jumping to hasty conclusions with the search for victims still on, but agreed there should be an investigation.
"When you have flash flooding, there's a risk that you won't have the personnel to make that—do that analysis, do the predictions in the best way," Castro said. "And it could lead to tragedy. So, I don’t want to sit here and say conclusively that that was the case, but I do think that it should be investigated."
Other Democrats have raised the possibility that cuts to FEMA may have played a role. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over FEMA, called for hearings on the agency's capacity to respond.
He noted that Trump has said he wants to eliminate FEMA altogether and "bring it down to the state level," a decision Thompson said is more dangerous than ever as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent.
DOGE also canceled $880 million worth of funding for FEMA's BRIC program, which focused on pre-disaster planning. In Kerr County, one of the hardest hit by the storm, the flood system has been described as "antiquated," lacking "basic components like sirens and river gauges." The county applied for pre-disaster mitigation funding from FEMA to upgrade their system in 2017 and 2018, during the first Trump administration, but was denied.
"This administration cannot pretend that disasters like this are happening in a vacuum. They cannot ignore the fact that natural disasters are becoming more severe and more frequent due to climate change," Thompson said.
On the storm response, he added: "The federal government—as well as state and local governments—all have a role to play. We must also determine if any budget cuts or staffing shortages at the federal level—of any kind—made matters worse."
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Senate Dems Demand Explanation After Big Oil Lobbied for 'Giveaways at the Expense of American Families'
The fossil fuel industry spent big to push through a $1 billion provision in the GOP budget bill, which the senators said would allow some oil companies to "pay no federal income taxes whatsoever."
Jun 27, 2025
Four Democratic U.S. senators are demanding an explanation from Big Oil after a $1.1 billion tax loophole was added to the Senate version of the GOP's budget reconciliation megabill.
Letters sent Thursday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called out the CEOs of two oil giants, ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv, which they say "lobbied furiously" for the handout.
The companies, the senators said, "[stand] to benefit tremendously from this provision and ha[ve] spent big to support it—while preserving the many government subsidies for the oil and gas industry already in the tax code."
They asked for the companies to disclose how much they have spent lobbying Republicans for the tax break and how much of a windfall they expect in return.
The provision in question, approved by the Senate Finance Committee last week, would shield many large oil companies from the Inflation Reduction Act's corporate alternative minimum tax, or CAMT. Introduced in 2022, the CAMT requires that companies making more than $1 billion pay 15% of the profits they report to shareholders.
"The rationale for CAMT was simple," the senators said. "For far too long, massive corporations had taken advantage of loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying their fair share, sometimes paying zero federal taxes despite earning billions in profits."
The GOP bill modifies how oil companies are required to report earnings, allowing them to exempt "intangible drilling and development costs," which in turn allows more companies to fall below the $1 billion earnings threshold.
The senators highlighted a 2023 earnings call by Marathon Oil, recently acquired by ConocoPhillips, in which executives said the CAMT was the only income tax they were required to pay.
"If enacted," the senators said, "this provision would reduce or even eliminate tax liabilities for oil and gas companies under CAMT, allowing some to pay no federal income taxes whatsoever."
The letter highlighted lobbying filings by ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv in which they "explicitly prioritize" securing this handout.
Referenced throughout is the aggressive effort to court Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who wrote the loophole into the Senate bill. According to OpenSecrets, Lankford received more than $546,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry—his top source of industry donations—between 2019 and 2024.
The senators described the industry's lobbying as "especially insulting" because "Senate Republicans are trying to pay for this handout with cuts to other programs that would end up raising energy prices for everyday Americans."
The GOP bill would eliminate tax breaks for clean energy that incentivize consumers to purchase electric vehicles and make their homes more energy-efficient, including the home energy-efficiency and residential clean energy credits.
Citing data from Rewiring America, the senators estimated that ditching the two credits would cost the average household up to $2,200 per year in savings on utility bills.
The Center for American Progress projects that eliminating electric vehicle credits would increase demand for gasoline, raising prices by 27 to 35 cents per gallon by 2035. Americans will pay the oil and gas industry "an additional $339 billion for gasoline and $75 billion for electricity by 2035," the May report says.
"Congress should not raise energy prices for working families to deliver handouts to Big Oil," the senators said.
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