It’s probably understandable that there has been relatively scant coverage of the rescission bill just passed by the Senate, and on its way back to the House before consummating its journey on the president’s desk. After the several weeks this spring and summer in which we were inundated with the intricacies of the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, the rescission package’s paltry $9 billion in cuts just seems rather humdrum in comparison.

And in truth, it really is fairly inconsequential. First, a bit of history, for context. The authority to rescind spending that was previously appropriated by Congress was established back in 1974 with the passage of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, Title X of which allows the president to make a request to Congress that they rescind specific appropriated spending items, replacing the previous ability of the President to unilaterally impound funding. President Reagan put the authority to request rescissions to moderately good use, and Congress approved 101 of the 133 requests that The Gipper made. The last time a rescission request was successful was during President Clinton’s term. So it’s high time that the practice be resurrected.

One catch is that the request has to be acted on by Congress within 45 days. Trump made this request about 44 days ago. Just goes to show that if you give Congress a specified timeframe in which to do something, they will invariably take every possible second allotted.

So what was in this rescission request? $9.4 billion, about $8.3 billion of which is to come from foreign aid, another $1.1 billion from cuts to public broadcasting.

This is a good start, but it is far from transformatory. The Treasury Department informs us that the government is running a roughly $1.3 trillion deficit. The federal budget is around $7 trillion — these cuts amount to less than 1% of non-defense discretionary spending. So, as a fiscal matter, this is a drop in the bucket, if your bucket is the size of a few Olympic-scale swimming pools. Nevertheless, it is progress.

Now, as for what is on the chopping block. The foreign aid piece is the largest, but here some perspective is in order: not counting Israel and Ukraine (who are fighting existential wars in which their respective victories are of crucial import to our national interest) the United States spend some $52 billion on foreign aid in 2024. This request is for that to be trimmed by a mere $8 billion and change. It is not much, but does keep the issue of foreign aid front and center.

It needs to be said that there are legitimate uses of foreign financial assistance, ones which attach to them a palpable connection to our national interests. But a great deal of the money the government doles out overseas no longer fits that purpose, and the government’s track record in third-world economic development has been deplorable for decades; there is good reason for the decay in public trust over how foreign aid is spent. This may be a fantastic opportunity for a reset — first, we need to develop a cohesive, realistic foreign policy; then Congress can get about the task of tailoring foreign aid in the direct pursuit of that policy. In the meantime, cutting $2.5 billion for directionless and usually counter-productive foreign economic development programs, and a half-billion earmarked to help Eastern European countries recover from the shackles of communism, three decades after they broke free of those shackles, makes eminent sense.

One can predict that the greatest caterwauling will be reserved for the cuts to public broadcasting. The central question to be asked here is simply: what is the purpose, in 2025, for the government to fund National Public Radio and PBS? There is little, if anything, in the broadcasting arena that cannot be done by private means. I say this as a listener of public radio — the local classical station, at least. I will merrily pay for the privilege to listen to J.S. Bach, Scarlatti, and Rachmaninoff, and even endure with greater tolerance those annoying pledge drives, in which they insist — paradoxically — that federal funding is a mere inconsequential pittance, and they need more than my tax dollars.

Now I could — almost — make the case that there is a role for the government in preserving and broadcasting the acoustic beauty of our Western musical inheritance, though even I can reluctantly concede that that may be simply a matter of personal (good) taste; but there is no logical argument for taxpayer funding of the tendentious programming that is foundational to NPR and PBS. No more than there would be a good argument for the Trump administration to fund the equally tendentious OAN.

Like the OBBB, the rescission bill is a good, tentative first step, if only symbolically so. But symbols have their purpose, and one must start somewhere. The biggest concern over this is that even in a Republican controlled Congress, and with rescission not being subject to a filibuster, it took this long, and this much wrangling, to cut a paltry $9 billion.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.