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Senate Republicans agreed to make changes to President Donald Trump’s multi-billion-dollar clawback package to help win over holdouts, but by shrinking the overall size of the cuts in the process.
Lawmakers left a meeting with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought on Tuesday afternoon and announced that about $400 million in proposed cuts to a global AIDS and HIV prevention program would be stripped from the legislation, dropping the total clawbacks in the president’s rescission package to $9 billion.
The original proposed slashes to the Bush-era President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) rattled some Senate Republicans, who warned publicly and privately that they would not support the package if the cuts remained.
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But lawmakers agreed to carve out the spending cuts with an amendment, and Senate leadership is hopeful that the change will corral enough holdouts to support the bill during a test vote later Tuesday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., can only afford to lose three Republicans during the partisan process.
Thune said after the meeting that there was “a lot of interest among our members” in seeing the PEPFAR cuts removed, and expressed hope that if lawmakers in the upper chamber could advance the bill, then House Republicans would be open to the modification.
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The top Senate Republican is eyeing the first test vote on the bill later on Tuesday evening, with another vote to kick off 10 hours of debate shortly after.
The changes to PEPFAR also come after Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., got guarantees that roughly $10 million would go toward rural radio stations on reservations, which was his primary concern, with cuts now redirected toward the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the government-backed funding arm for NPR and PBS.
However, whether the changes are enough to sway key holdouts, like Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, remains to be seen.
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A senior administration official pushed back against the narrative surrounding the proposed PEPFAR cuts, and told Fox News Digital that the clawbacks were geared toward limited program cuts targeted at “LGBTQ education and capacity building — not core life-saving care.”
“We’re already working with countries and other partners to ensure that they shoulder a greater share of the burden where they can,” the official said. “We continue to make targeted investments in mother-to-child prevention, and other key areas of focus.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt, who has acted as a bridge between the White House and Senate on the rescission package, said that the administration supported the change, but was still unsure if there were enough votes to get the package across the line.
“I’m not in the prediction business, but we’re hopeful we’ll move forward here,” the Missouri Republican said.
Vought argued that it was still “substantially the same package,” and noted that the Senate had to work its will on the bill.
Lawmakers have until Friday before the stroke of midnight to get the bill on the president’s desk, or else the holds that the White House has on the billions in funding will end.
“This is multi-year funding, it has to flow,” Vought said. “If we’re outside of the 45-day window, we have to remove our hold on the money. So we will not implement the cuts if this is if this vote doesn’t go our way.”
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