Sen. Lisa Murkowski spoke on the Senate floor Wednesday to express her opposition to the proposed federal rescissions package, which seeks to cancel roughly $9.4 billion in previously approved government spending.
The package, supported by President Donald Trump, targets $8.3 billion in foreign aid and $1.1 billion in domestic programs, including funds allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Murkowski, criticized the proposal for undermining commitments already made by Congress. She raised concerns about the potential impact on communities that had been counting on this funding for infrastructure, public services, and other local priorities.
“It’s not that I don’t think we should be doing more when it comes to ensuring that we’re working to get our levels of spending down,” she said, although she has no history of attempting to reduce spending and a long history of supporting increased spending.
“But I also think we need to be doing more as legislators, more as lawmakers, more as senators when it comes to our own authorities, our constitutional authorities, when it comes to the power the purse. We do rescissions. We do rescissions in our annual budget bills, in our own appropriations bills, in fact, bills we are working on right now as appropriators. We’ve got a series of markups that are going to be coming up this week, we had some last week. We do this. We look to provisions that have been included in the budgets, we look to programs, we look to rescind. We do that as legislators. There’s a good reason I think we haven’t seen a successful rescissions package before the senate for in almost 33 years. It’s because we’ve recognized that hey, that’s our role here,” she said.
She spoke to not knowing which specific accounts could be impacted and said she wanted more clarity from the Administration. And she lamented she hadn’t gotten enough information about global health programs that would be cut. Then she strongly defended the Corporation for Pubic Broadcasting.
“You don’t need to gut the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” She said if public broadcasting is biased, that could be addressed in a different way, although she has never suggested this before.
It was five minutes of, essentially, her opposition to Donald Trump, who was elected by 54.4% in Alaska in 2024.
Murkowski was one of three Republicans who tried to block the package from coming to the Senate floor. Vice President JD Vance had to come into the Senate chambers and break the tie to move it forward. With Senate Democrats largely unified against the measure, its passage remains uncertain.
A final vote on the rescissions package is expected later this week.
More Murkowski Pork.