Rescissions Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. President, the rescissions package before us reduces access to educational programming for children and locally produced public radio and television programming. It diminishes America's global leadership while eliminating lifesaving aid from the world's most vulnerable populations.

I want to spend a minute on the impact that this will have on public radio and television, including the disproportionate impact it will have on rural communities.

One in four Wisconsinites lives in a rural community, and many rely on public broadcasting for local news, emergency alerts, and free educational programming, especially for children. Wisconsin Public Radio is the primary broadcast relay for Wisconsin's Emergency Alert System, including AMBER Alerts and lifesaving weather alerts like tornado and flash flood warnings. Look no further than the absolutely devastating news out of Texas. Access to high-quality information can truly be the difference between life and death. Access to local news from reporters and sources that community members trust is more important than ever.

Stripping away this funding would also endanger local news that is already disappearing in so many Wisconsin communities. In 2024--just last year--almost 20 percent of our local newspapers shut down in Wisconsin, according to a study by Northwestern University. That same study found that Wisconsin's northernmost county, Bayfield, had no local news sources at all while 22 counties across Wisconsin had just 1 local news source.

That is where public radio plays a critical role in keeping Wisconsinites connected with their communities. Stations like WXPR in Rhinelander, WI, would be under threat if this package advances--one of the few news sources producing local reporting in Wisconsin's Northwoods and Michigan's Upper Peninsula--or Radio Milwaukee, which, because of public funding, can broadcast local school board meetings for parents and families to stay in touch with what is happening in their communities.

Without Federal support for public media, this critical information could disappear for Wisconsin families. This is what public broadcasting means for Wisconsinites, but it applies to all the States that we represent. That should be reason enough to oppose this bill on the substance of it.

But the other reason is the extraordinary process that is being used to make this change and the impact it would have on the ability of this body to perform its most basic functions. If passed, this bill would represent the first time this rescissions process would be used to pass completely partisan rescissions, and in doing so, we would undo bipartisan agreements.

That is why I oppose this bill, and I hope enough of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will choose to do so as well.

The Senate passes bipartisan appropriations bills every year. They are hard, and they take months to negotiate, and it doesn't always work as well as it should. Senators on both sides of the aisle often discuss wanting to return to something we call regular order. We decry full- year continuing resolutions, or CRs, and government shutdowns. We say we want to bring appropriations bills to the floor. This isn't a pipedream, and I reject the idea that the appropriations process can't work anymore. More often than not, we pass appropriations bills within the first few months of the new fiscal year--not ideal but workable. We certainly need to work to make it better, and the full-year continuing resolution we find ourselves in right now is a prime example of its failing, but throwing in the towel, as this bill does, would make it so much worse.

I want to highlight one example of when the appropriations process worked how it should that is particularly relevant in this exact moment.

It was just a few years ago, in fiscal year 2019, that the Labor- Health and Human Services bill--not the easiest bill--passed the Senate and was signed into law prior to the start of the next fiscal year. At that time, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Shelby, along with other Republicans and in working with Democrats, vowed to return to regular order and committed to it.

In May of 2018, President Trump submitted a rescissions package just like the one we are contending with today. Enough Republicans joined all of the Democrats in opposing it. It failed, and that was the end of it.

Then, 3 months later, a combined Defense and Labor-Health and Human Services bill passed. It passed the Senate; it passed the House; and it was signed into law by President Trump on September 28--just days short of the expiration of fiscal year 2018. It wasn't the only pair of bills. Several other appropriations bills were enacted prior to October 1 also.

My Republican colleagues knew then that passing partisan rescissions packages would make passing bipartisan appropriations bills that much harder, if it would be possible at all. That is what we are debating today. The issue here is really simple: How can any minority party, Democrat or Republican, make concessions as part of these bipartisan appropriations negotiations if the majority just walks back those deals a few months later?

The answer is, it can't, and that is why we have never passed partisan rescissions packages like this before.

Passing this rescissions package will also, very likely, mean that there will be more to come. In fact, OMB Director Russ Vought has said as much. Right now, the Department of Education is withholding $7 billion in funding that normally goes out at this time of year to the States for the upcoming school year to support afterschool programs, STEM education, school counselors, and smaller class sizes, among many other things.

Will the administration put that funding in the next rescissions package?

So, if we pass this bill, we would find ourselves right back here in a couple of months--with the President exerting his influence to pass another partisan rescissions package--or we can end this here, like we did in 2018, and deal with these issues where they should be dealt with and where they frequently are dealt with as part of the appropriations process. We can and should debate the issues raised in this rescissions package as part of the annual appropriations process. We should mark up bills in committee and bring them to the floor.

But you cannot vote for this rescissions package and then argue for regular order or decry brinksmanship over government funding and government shutdowns or full-year continuing resolutions because walking back on bipartisan agreements like this rescissions package does will make future bipartisan agreements that much harder, if not impossible.

As the ranking member on the Labor, Health and Human Services Subcommittee, I commit to working with my Republican colleagues on their specific concerns with funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the concerns I have heard raised as part of the debate on this package actually weren't even raised as part of the appropriations process in the last 2 years as I chaired this subcommittee. My colleagues are saying that this is such a grave problem that we have to take the extraordinary step of rescinding funding when these issues weren't even raised when we passed the appropriations bills with this funding in it originally. That is not how this process should work.

To my colleagues, if you are for regular order, if you want this body to work better and want more bipartisanship and less partisanship, I sincerely ask you to deeply reflect on what this vote means for that goal that a majority of our constituents want from us. I urge my colleagues to vote no.

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