Ohio U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno said Thursday he believes the Senate has to advance an amended version of the GOP-backed recissions request from the White House.
Unlike the normal Congressional budgetary process, the recissions process is a way of canceling already-OK’d appropriations. In this case, President Donald Trump months ago tasked Republicans with clawing back $9.4 billion in foreign aid funding and money for PBS and NPR, which trickles down to local public broadcast affiliates, too.
Government money for those efforts is “wasteful,” Moreno said. Still, he said the Senate will amend what the House sent over, which came after a tight 214-212 vote.
“This is a very small rescissions package in the scheme of things: 9 billion with a B out of a budget, that’s over 7 trillion with a T, so we will look at that, we’re going to be looking at it very carefully,” Moreno said.
Nine of Ohio’s 10 GOP Congressmen voted for the recissions package in June. Rep. Mike Turner, from Dayton, was one of four Republicans to vote ‘no,’ while Rep. Joyce Beatty, a Democrat from Columbus, missed the vote for medical reasons.
With a July 18 deadline, the Senate has less than a week to act before the White House would be forced to disburse the money it targeted for the claw back.
In an interview Thursday with the Statehouse News Bureau, Moreno also defended the “One Big Beautiful Bill” bill that Trump signed last Friday.
“(We) worked really hard to get the Big Beautiful Bill across the finish line, and now we’re celebrating all the great elements in that bill—record funding for Medicaid in Ohio, Ohio will never have received more Medicaid dollars than they will over the next few years,” Moreno said.
The biggest cuts to funding for Medicaid take the form of work requirements for program enrollees, although Ohio had submitted an earlier federal waiver to add work requirements for its enrollees.
Among other measures, the bill made major changes to federal food assistance, too, by adding work requirements and also eventually shifting extensive costs onto states.
