GOP's foreign aid vote will cost lives -- and they don't care

GOP’s foreign aid vote will cost lives — and they don’t care
Their decision to claw back $9 billion in funding will be catastrophic

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published July 18, 2025 9:22AM (EDT)


(Salon) This morning in the wee hours, following approval by the Senate on Thursday night, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to claw back $9 billion in funding for foreign aid. The bill had been approved by the Senate on Thursday night and will be signed into law by President Donald Trump later today. According to the medical journal Lancet, the funding loss is so catastrophic that it could cause more than 14 million excess deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children younger than five.

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Republicans used an arcane provision of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which was enacted in the wake of budgetary abuses by Richard Nixon, another imperial president who routinely impounded funding simply because he didn’t like laws that he himself had signed. Nixon claimed then — as the Trump administration claims now —that although the Constitution might say that Congress has the responsibility to appropriate funds, nothing says the president has to spend it. This practice was taken to court repeatedly and Nixon lost each time, including one unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court.

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As HuffPost reported, rescission is a favorite hobby horse of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget — and primary author of Project 2025 — whose self-proclaimed primary goal is to “put [federal workers] in trauma.” His apparent taste for political sadism is now to extending beyond the government to millions of other people around the world. Vought is even pushing the idea of so-called “pocket rescissions,” an unethical and legally dubious shortcut in which the president submits a request for a funding cut late in the year so the funding would expire before the 45 days is up.

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According to HuffPost, Vought commented at a recent Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters that he sees no reason to even try to accomplish anything in a bipartisan manner. He stipulated that his office will “only work with House and Senate Democratic appropriators ‘if they conduct themselves with decorum.'” Since he knows the MAGA zombies in Congress will blindly walk off of any cliff Trump tells them to, that’s not a problem. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/18/gops-foreign-aid-vote-will-cost-lives-and-they-dont-care/