Rescissions Package a First Step to Trimming Spending

The White House Office of Management and Budget sent a letter to Congress today requesting a rescission of discretionary funding totaling $9.4 billion largely for foreign aid and public broadcast organizations. Congress will now be able to consider the package and codify the requested spending cuts.

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: 

Enacting a rescissions package is a first step toward the major deficit reduction this country needs. We are borrowing nearly $2 trillion annually, on pace to hit record debt within a few years, and the House passed a bill to make the debt $3 trillion worse. Nonetheless, every bit of savings helps.

Rescissions packages can reduce the amount we spend and actually put that money to deficit reduction. They offer a way to actually codify some of the ‘DOGE’ savings into law, giving the President the opportunity to identify spending cuts and the Congress the chance to enact them.

Rescission requests used to be fairly common, and hopefully they will be again. While $9.4 billion may be small in the context of $7 trillion of annual spending, this practice can help build muscle memory and encourage policymakers to tackle the larger spending programs in the future.

However, we’d be remiss to not point out that this package comes in the context of potential enactment of a reconciliation bill adding $3 trillion to the debt over the next decade – the equivalent of more than 300 times the amount of these rescissions.

Congress should quickly consider this request and then carry over any cuts they agree to into next year’s appropriations bills or replace them with equivalent cuts.

Then Congress should work to have the reconciliation package follow the rescissions package’s lead – reducing rather than adding to future debt levels. 

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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director for Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.