Vice President JD Vance just played the ultimate tiebreaker in the Senate, pushing forward a hefty $9.4 billion rescissions package that could spell doom for PBS and NPR.
The New York Post reported that in a dramatic procedural showdown on Tuesday, Vance cast two crucial votes to break a 50-50 Senate deadlock, allowing debate to begin on a spending clawback measure backed by the White House.
The House already gave its nod to this measure last month with a razor-thin 214-212 vote, setting the stage for the Senate’s high-stakes faceoff.
Before Vance stepped in, the Senate was stuck in a partisan gridlock over whether to even discuss this multibillion-dollar cutback plan.
The package slashes about $8.3 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development and $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports public media giants like NPR and PBS.
Three Republican senators—Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine—crossed the aisle to join all Democrats in opposing the bill, highlighting the deep divisions over these cuts.
While the Senate now has at least 10 hours to debate before voting on amendments and the final bill, the potential defunding of public broadcasting has already sparked public outcry, including a rally at Boston Common where one sign pleaded, “Stop Cuts Save PBS & NPR.”
Senator Susan Collins, defending her opposition, pointed out a glaring issue with the process: “The rescissions package has a big problem — nobody knows what program reductions are in it.”
Collins has a point—when the Office of Management and Budget fails to provide specifics, it’s hard to cheer for cuts that might gut valuable services without clear justification, even if some of us cringe at NPR’s editorial slant.
Collins also flagged a proposed $2.5 billion cut to development assistance programs covering essentials like education and food security, lamenting the absence of details on how these reductions would play out.
“We should know exactly what programs are affected and the consequences of rescissions,” Collins insisted, and it’s tough to argue against transparency when taxpayer dollars are at stake.
Let’s be real—while progressive agendas often hide behind vague budgeting, conservatives shouldn’t champion blind cuts either; we need to know what we’re slashing before celebrating fiscal restraint.
Collins didn’t hold back on the public media cuts, calling them “excessive” and worrying about PBS viewers losing access to family favorites like “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”
She also noted that in Maine, this funding props up emergency alerts and local high school basketball broadcasts—hardly the stuff of radical indoctrination.
However, it's all the things that Collins omits that make defunding public broadcasting like PBS and NPR so important. For years, public broadcasting has pushed leftist narratives and defeating that is more important than preserving “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”