Schmitt celebrates Senate passage of $9 billion DOGE cuts as 'important step'

Sen. Eric Schmitt told the White House budget office in January that he wanted to help it cut wasteful spending using a rare procedure known as rescissions.

Five months later, the Missouri Republican was put in charge of ushering President Trump’s $9.4 billion rescissions request through the Senate, where there was some Republican resistance to the process and to the proposed cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting.

“One of the things that we don’t often get a chance to do is to actually cut wasteful spending. And I thought that would be a worthy endeavor and something good to spend time on,” Mr. Schmitt said in an interview with The Washington Times from his Capitol Hill office Thursday.

That morning, Mr. Schmitt was celebrating the Senate’s passage of $9 billion of the president’s requested cuts, which will codify roughly 5% of the $190 billion in savings the Department of Government Efficiency says it has identified.

The House was poised to pass the Senate-amended measure late Thursday or early Friday.

“We’re $37 trillion in debt, and you’ve got to start somewhere. And I think this was an important step,” Mr. Schmitt said. “This is why you run for office, is to be able to get stuff like this done.”

He said the rescissions package is one of several steps Republicans are taking under the Trump administration to fulfill their campaign promises of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in government.

The bulk of the cuts, $7.9 billion, are from foreign aid accounts, and the intention was to ensure that foreign aid is more aligned with American interests, in addition to cutting waste.

“If you ask people, do you want the money you send to Washington to go to Guatemala to pay for sex change operations,” Mr. Schmitt said, they would likely say no. “I think we’re on pretty solid ground there.”

In addition to millions of dollars that the Biden administration spent on Guatemalan sex change operations, Mr. Schmitt cited other examples of wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, such as funds for “Sesame Street” in Iraq and diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Myanmar.

“All this crazy stuff that the American people never voted on,” he said.

Although Democrats and even some Republicans argued that the Trump administration had the power to stop spending on those types of programs without the rescissions cuts, Mr. Schmitt said that’s even more reason to eliminate the funding.

“Well then, we don’t need that money anymore, right? If it’s not being spent, then what’s the problem with the rescission?” he said.

Cutting the spending is also about “restoring trust,” Mr. Schmitt said.

“When I go back home every week, that’s the stuff that drives people nuts, because they say, ‘What in the world is going on in Washington, D.C., that you’ve got this money being spent on this?’” he said. “And so I think it’s the ability to show that, yeah, we understand that, and we’re going to do something about it.”

The Senate’s passage of the rescissions package was not guaranteed.

In his first term, Mr. Trump sent a $15 billion cuts package to Congress, which cleared the House but was blocked in the Senate.

Mr. Schmitt was not in Congress then but knew he had his work cut out for him. It had been more than three decades since Republicans successfully used the rescissions process to cut spending, in 1992 under the George H.W. Bush administration.

“There was a genuine desire for us to prove that we could do the things that people have talked about for a long time,” he said. “We wanted to show that we had the political will to do it and that we were listening to the American people.”

The senator spent weeks working to sway on-the-fence Republicans to support the package. In the end, only two, Sens. Susan M. Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined all the chamber’s Democrats by voting in opposition.

Multiple Senate Republicans have raised concerns about the rescissions package in recent weeks, including its impact on rural broadcasters and global health programs.

Mr. Schmitt was able to work with the White House and Republican leaders to address most senators’ qualms without significantly changing the package.

They did agree to restore $400 million in funding for a global AIDS prevention program called the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

“I try to have good relationships with everybody, and work with everybody,” he said. “I certainly have my own perspective on things, but I think when you want to try to work with people as best you can. And I think you kind of saw that come together.”

Mr. Schmitt was proud of preserving a $1.1 billion cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which will effectively end taxpayer funding to NPR and PBS.

“The abuse, the bias, is long-standing,” he said of the outlets’ liberal-leaning coverage. “NPR now has the head of the group that has called President Trump a racist, and they have crazy programming. And just, I don’t think there’s much of an appetite for us to continue to spend money.”

Republicans discussed during their final conference lunch before the rescissions vote how the party has been trying to defund the CPB since the Reagan administration.

“This has been something that’s time has come,” Mr. Schmitt said. “And if it was easy. I guess it would have been done a long time ago, but I’m glad we were able to do it.”

Whether the full $1.1 billion cut to CPB would survive was in question throughout the process. Several Republicans wanted to protect the roughly 70% of those dollars that go to local broadcasters, many affiliates of NPR and PBS, even though they supported cutting off taxpayer funding to the national outlets.

Mr. Schmitt said one of the frequent arguments he heard about retaining funding for the local public broadcasters was that they released emergency alerts for natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and flash floods.

He rebutted those by noting that FEMA has a system for broadcasting emergency alerts and that local broadcasters could still rely on private financing to continue such operations.

“There’s plenty of stations like PBS that have a local role, but the primary role for broadcasting emergencies is with FEMA,” said Mr. Schmitt, describing that as part of his information campaign to get senators comfortable with the rescissions package.

Several Republicans also raised the issue of the lack of detailed information in the White House request about the foreign aid cuts.

The administration specified amounts it wanted to cut by accounts but did not detail which programs under those accounts would be reduced or eliminated.

So Mr. Schmitt spent a lot of time working with the White House to explain to senators which programs would be spared.

The senator agrees with his colleagues who have said the White House should provide more details when it sends its next rescissions request, which Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said would be coming “soon.”

“More information, the better,” Mr. Schmitt said.

He said there are “a lot” of options for what cuts should follow, including more that could be reduced from foreign aid.

“What DOGE uncovered and what this administration is committed to is sort of tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Schmitt said.