WASHINGTON – Congress has approved the White House’s request to hold off $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting after Republicans bowed to President Donald Trump on an extraordinary surrender in Congressional power.
For WUCF, Central Florida news station, that means millions of dollars will be lost dedicated to providing free access to news to community members. Radio stations 90.7 FM Orlando and 89.5 FM Ocala will also lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The home’s 216-213 votes sent a package to Trump for his signature early on Friday. Two Republicans, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Michael Turner of Ohio, opposed the measure.
The Senate approved the package with a 51-48 vote the day before, overcoming opposition between two Republicans, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkovsky of Alaska.
The majority of the funds covered (approximately $8 billion) were for foreign aid programs. The remaining $1.1 billion was for public broadcasting companies funding NPR and PBS.
WUCF, a PBS affiliate offered by the University of Central Florida, is one of many affected stations. The station employs both regular staff and students.
According to public financial documents, the station received just over $1 million from the university for television and radio programs in 2024, but the station received twice that amount in federal funds.
In an email, WUCF executive director Jennifer Cook told Orlando Sentinel that the $2 million federal funding will be “directly fueled by its ability to provide critical educational programming, reliable emergency alerts and local stories that preserve Central Florida’s history and culture.”
For Florida Public Media’s Central Media, another local station hosting 90.7 FM Orlando and 89.5 FM Ocala, the cuts would result in a loss of $300,000 in federal funds. That’s about 10% of the overall budget, said Judith Smercer, the department’s president and general manager.
Also, Florida’s recently approved budget cuts will lose roughly $100,000 in state funding.
As a result, the station will launch in 2024 and suspend a one-year emerging journalist fellowship program intended to immerse students in real-world independent journalism.
Smelser said he would not fill two open positions: one of the digital content and engineering. This leads to a lack of reporting capabilities, including the ability to return into the air after a power outage.
Smelser said the station would see a drop in funds as soon as September.
“We’re actually going to punish the local station,” said Rick Branson, a UCF journalism professor and former Central Florida public media reporter. “It really makes me sad to see this organization punished in a way.”
The impact on public media has not yet come, but the passage of the bill has resulted in immediate warnings. NPR CEO Katherine Maher said in a statement early Friday that the cuts represented “an unfair dismantling of beloved local civic institutions and the act of Congress in ignoring the will of the public.”
NPR and PBS survive. Only a small percentage of the funds come from the federal government. However, this cut will mark many local stations’ significant reductions in programming and operation as early as this fall.
The package could be a death sentence for some stations, and has survived several attempts to suffocate funds over decades. For other broadcasters, that means reducing local programming.
“We don’t have much fat to trim anywhere else,” said Julie Overguard, executive director of South Dakota Public Broadcast, in an interview before the vote.
“On the PBS side of things, you can’t start cherry picking which country’s programs you want and pay only for them,” she said. “So we and many others have little choice but to look at local programming that we self-generate.”
The debate over the measures exposed the fierce battle over the power of Congress’ wallets. Since Trump began his second term, the White House has moved unilaterally, and sometimes unilaterally, through government efficiency, primarily through government efficiency, to expand the power that the Constitution gives to the legislative sector, primarily through the government’s Department of Efficiency.
Top White House officials led by Budget Director Russell Vert have tried to keep the size of the federal government down, including freezing funds allocated by Congress. This is part of a broader campaign to assert broad powers over the president’s federal spending.
This time, the administration went through a formal process by submitting what is known as a rescue bill. Given that Congress has historically protected its power over federal spending, these measures are rare and rarely successful. The last package to be enacted was in 1999 under President Bill Clinton.
Trump wasted some time celebrating the single-out on social media for all caps early on Friday in an all-cap social media post, up until “savage NPR and public broadcasting, billions of dollars in the year wasted.”
“Republicans have been trying to do this for 40 years, they failed, but nothing more,” he added. “This is big!!”
GOP leaders said the vote was a symbolic victory that underscored the willingness to cut federal spending that Republican-held Congress deemed inappropriate and useless.
“I am grateful for all the work the administration has done in identifying wasteful spending,” Sen. John Tune, the leader of the majority, said in a speech before the vote. “Now is the time for the Senate to play its part in reducing some of its waste from its budget. The small but important steps towards financial sanity that we should all agree on are long behind.”
But the process left even Republicans who ultimately voted uncomfortably for the bill. Many senators said the administration has not provided details on how certain programs will be affected.
“If we find out that some of these programs we’ve told should be out of scope, the president’s advisors will decide to cut it anyway,” the retired RN.C. Senator said, “We’ll take that into consideration.”
The vote infuriated Democrats who claimed they were handing over Congress’ constitutional powers in the name of cutting Congress’ constitutional powers, just weeks after Republicans passed the marquee tax bill that added $4 trillion to the federal deficit.
They warned that future bipartisan negotiations to fund the government could have disastrous consequences. Lawmakers are currently working on spending levels negotiations prior to the September 30th closing deadline.
“We never saw bipartisan investments being cut through partisan rescue packages,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a top Democrat on the Budget Committee. “Don’t start now. At this moment, it’s not when we’re working in a bipartisan way of passing our spending bill. Bipartisanship doesn’t end with one line crossing. It’s eroding. It breaks little by little.
A version of this article was originally published in The New York Times.
Original issue: July 18th, 2025, 1:35pm EDT
