President Donald Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package is back in the House after being passed in the Senate. But while Congress is on track to give the president his first DOGE cuts, it’s hardly a great victory.
At the rate the U.S. is running, $9 billion amounts to barely half a day’s U.S. government spending, and it took a lot of time and work to likely clawback money that would have been gone in less than 12 hours.
The U.S. federal government spent $6.75 trillion in the last fiscal year. While the money is not evenly spent day-to-day, that amounts to nearly $130 billion a week, more than $18 billion a day, more than $770 million an hour, or $12.8 million a minute on average.
“This is trying to buy a House by collecting pennies,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). “It is so far short of what is really needed to be done to right the fiscal ship.”
With the national debt at $36 trillion, the second biggest line item in federal government spending is paying interest on that debt (just behind Social Security).
The government has also been running on so-called continuing resolutions after Congress failed to pass a budget and efforts to reach a bipartisan budget deal going forward appear destined for failure.
The president unveiled his first round of DOGE cuts for Congress more than a month ago and the House still needs to make sure the bill passes by Friday.
Even to get to where the bill currently stands on the verge of passage, Republican leaders had to spend weeks negotiating and making compromises with members to claw back what barely amounts to a drop in the bucket for government spending, and it is nowhere even close to the president’s original DOGE goal to find $2 trillion in savings.
In the end, the bill will cut $8 billion in foreign aid and more than $1 billion in public broadcasting, a major blow to NPR and PBS more than a decade after Mitt Romney threatened to fire Big Bird at a presidential debate.
The Senate version of the bill included an amendment to save money for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program that combats HIV/AIDS and is credited with saving tens of millions of lives around the world.
The final version of the Senate bill was $9 billion, down from the $9.4 billion package first passed in the House. It passed 51 to 48 early Thursday with Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joining Democrats in voting against it.
It is now back in the House for final passage before hitting the president’s desk, but it remains to be seen whether they can even meet tomorrow’s deadline with their crammed agenda.
When Trump first tapped Elon Musk to lead DOGE, he gave the group a goal to find $2 trillion in federal government savings by July 2026. The tech billionaire barely made a dent before his exit from the Trump administration in May, which was quickly followed by his explosive public breakup with the president.
The White House vowed the $9 billion rescissions package is just the first of many that the administration will send over to Congress.
Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought repeated after meeting with Senate Republicans on Tuesday that more DOGE cut bills would be sent to the Hill, but he said he would not get ahead of the current rescissions package as senators worked to reach a final deal.
While some Republicans, who claim to be fiscal conservatives, complain that the 12 hours of spending cuts does not go far enough, Republicans passed Trump’s megabill just weeks ago with nearly all the GOP’s support.
Despite calls to tackle the national debt and cut government spending, CRFB estimated that the legislation would add $4.1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade and increase the national deficit by $600 billion a year.
“That DOGE claimed it was going to achieve $2 trillion savings, which was a preposterous claim to begin with, but only has $9 billion being considered now, and the fact that Congress is already trying to unravel the savings in the reconciliation bill they just passed, all demonstrate how non-serious the fiscal efforts are right now,” MacGuineas said.
