Congress Should Pass a ‘Rescission’ Package to Enact DOGE Spending Cuts

By Senator Lindsey Graham

Breitbart

March 7, 2025

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/03/07/exclusive-sen-lindsey-graham-congress-should-pass-a-rescission-package-to-enact-doge-spending-cuts/

President Trump has started the process of looking at how taxpayer dollars are being spent in Washington.

This has been talked about and talked about by conservatives, but President Trump and his team are actually doing it. I couldn’t be more pleased that his administration is prioritizing this because it is long overdue. Like any major reform effort, there will be missteps that need to be corrected. At a recent meeting between Senate Republicans and Elon Musk, we talked about collaborating better so that we can make sure we hit the target. As President Trump rightly said on Thursday, by using a “scalpel rather than the hatchet,” we will achieve success for the American people.

However, it is long past time for us to evaluate how Americans’ tax dollars are being spent and what they are being spent on. We have a massive national debt and run at least a trillion dollars of deficits every year.

DOGE’s work product is stunning, and I applaud their efforts. They are finding outrageous examples of wasteful spending that should offend Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, and vegetarians.

For example, DOGE found that between 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Small Business Administration issued over 3,000 loans totaling more than $300 million to borrowers over 115 years old —who are still marked “alive” in the Social Security database.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, in partnership with DOGE, unearthed and canceled $324,671 in funding to “enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within Integrated Pest Management.” The stated goal of the grant funding was to “drive cultural change within the Integrated Pest Management discipline, fostering a more inclusive community.”

Through DOGE’s efforts, more than $10 million in NIH funding was canceled, including federal grants for:

— $1.7 million for the “China Health and Retirement Longitudinal study” at Peking University in Beijing, China

— $135,000 for a research grant to China Medical University in Shenyang, China

— $142,000 for “using telehealth to improve access to gender-affirming care”

— $1.3 million for “transforming health for gender-diverse young adults”

— $120,000 for “personalized 3-D avatar tool development” focused on “gender identities”

— $400,000 for researching “sources of minority stress and alcohol consumption” among “adults who report uncertainty about their sexual orientation”

— $160,000 for researching “racialized sexual discrimination” among “young sexual minority men of color”

— $241,000 for “an intervention to promote healthy relationships among transgender and gender expansive youth”

The money taxpayers send to Washington comes from hard work and should be honored, not wasted. There is certainly a role for government in our lives, but your hard-earned tax dollars should be treated with respect, not a sense of entitlement.

The question is, how do you cut the crazy stuff they found in the federal budget?

The answer is through a process called rescission. It allows the White House to put together a package of spending cuts and send it to Congress for approval. A rescission package has to originate from the White House, and there are some budgetary limits of how and what can be cut.

However, I believe a lot of what DOGE has found would fit within these parameters. President Trump attempted to use this process in 2018 to cut federal spending. Unfortunately, we fell short in the Senate by two votes. But the American people have spoken once again, and President Trump’s attitude and insistence that things change in Washington is most assuredly paying off.

By using the rescission process, we can cut waste out of the government and hopefully restore some confidence to the public that things are changing in Washington for the better. I urge the White House, in collaboration with the House and the Senate, to put together a rescission package using DOGE’s work product as soon as possible.

We need to demonstrate to the American taxpayer that the Trump administration and Republican majorities in Congress are not just talking about cutting waste from the federal budget but are actually doing it.

The Senate Budget Committee is integral to this process, as rescission is allowed under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. As chairman of the Budget Committee, I welcome a rescission package from the White House that is built around DOGE’s work product. The sooner this process starts, the better off the taxpayer will be.

Furthermore, this spending reduction package can be passed by a simple majority vote. In other words, if all Republicans in the House and the Senate voted for the rescission package, it would pass without a single Democratic vote. However, I would hope that Democrats would join Republicans in voting to eliminate the outrageous – and at times comical – spending discovered by DOGE.

Again, hats off to DOGE for their great work. The more they find, the more we can do. It is possible to do more than one rescission package, and we should begin that effort now.

 

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