The bill
Rescissions Act of 2025
HR. 4, 119th Congress — read as touching Print & Broadcast Media.
Sponsored by
Rep. Scalise, Steve [R-LA-1]
ID: S001176
Follow the money
The bill
HR. 4, 119th Congress — read as touching Print & Broadcast Media.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
30 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Introduction" section, p. 300-302 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Became Public Law No: 119-28.
July 23, 2025
📍 Current Status
This bill has become law!
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, folks! The Rescissions Act of 2025 is a beautifully crafted exercise in bureaucratic doublespeak, designed to make you think the government is actually doing something responsible with your money.
Let's get down to business. This bill rescinds a whopping $7.3 billion in unobligated balances from various programs and agencies. Sounds impressive, right? But don't be fooled – this is just a drop in the ocean of our national debt.
Breaking it down, we see that the biggest losers are:
* International Organizations: $1.2 billion in rescissions * Bilateral Economic Assistance: $4.3 billion in rescissions * Multilateral Assistance: $436 million in rescissions
Notable programs taking a hit include:
* Global Health Programs: $500 million in rescissions (but don't worry, HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis funding is safe... for now) * Migration and Refugee Assistance: $800 million in rescissions (because who needs to help refugees, anyway?) * Complex Crises Fund: $43 million in rescissions (I guess we're not that interested in preventing global catastrophes after all)
Now, let's talk about the real story here. This bill is not about responsible budgeting or fiscal discipline; it's about politics and pork-barrel spending. The fact that they're rescinding unobligated balances from previous years just means they're trying to cover up their own incompetence.
And what about those "notable exceptions" in section 5? Ah, yes – the ones where they make sure to exempt certain programs from the rescissions? That's just a clever way of saying, "We're not actually serious about cutting spending; we just want to look like it."
As for fiscal impact and deficit implications, let's be real: this bill is a rounding error in the grand scheme of our national debt. It's a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
In conclusion, the Rescissions Act of 2025 is a masterclass in legislative obfuscation. It's a cynical attempt to make voters think their elected officials are doing something responsible with taxpayer dollars. But don't be fooled – this bill is just another symptom of the disease that plagues our government: a complete and utter disregard for fiscal responsibility.
Diagnosis: Terminal case of bureaucratic doublespeak, with symptoms of incompetence, cowardice, and a healthy dose of hypocrisy. Prognosis: Poor. Treatment: A strong dose of transparency, accountability, and actual leadership (but don't hold your breath).
Rep. Scalise, Steve [R-LA-1]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
No PAC contributions found
No committee contributions found
This bill has 5 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.
ID: C001053
Top Contributors
10
ID: B001314
Top Contributors
10
ID: S000250
Top Contributors
10
ID: G000596
Top Contributors
10
ID: M001213
Top Contributors
10
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 77 nodes and 45 connections (74 secondary connections hidden)
Total contributions: $4,596,250
Showing top 25 donors by contribution amount
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 1 harmed.
Section 2(b)(20)(A)-(B) rescinds amounts made available for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027, which harms public broadcasters and related media entities.
For each industry this bill affects, here's what the sponsor (Rep. Scalise, Steve [R-LA-1])received from donors associated with that industry during the 2022–present cycles. Donations are not proof of intent — they are a record of who funds the people writing the law.
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.
— 267 — Agency for International Development benefits financially from extending and expanding these large-scale programs for years, even decades, ensures little scrutiny of these ever-increasing appropriations. The massive growth in “emergency” aid distorts humanitarian responses, wors- ens corruption in the countries we support, and exacerbates the misery of those we intend to help. The permanence of this assistance, particularly in countries where we have little to no in-country presence and must rely on U.N. agencies to self-monitor, has morphed into a co-governance scheme in which the U.S. govern- ment effectively finances the social services obligations of corrupt regimes that threaten the United States. These governments can then redirect scarce budget resources away from costly health and education toward financing their wars, sup- porting terrorism, repressing their citizens, and enriching themselves. Examples of this abuse are spread throughout the world. l Over the past decade, the U.S. government has expended $14 billion in aid to Syria where the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad—a close ally of Iran and Russia—skims nearly half of foreign aid through inflated official exchange rates, the diversion of food baskets to its military units, and procurement arrangements with compromised local contractors. l Yemen, once the breadbasket of the Arabian Peninsula, is now dependent on billions of dollars of aid as formerly productive Yemeni farmers cannot compete against “free food” while irrigation systems remain in disrepair, leaving the country to suffer from water shortages during long summer droughts and flooding during its rainy season. Iran-backed Houthi rebels divert substantial amounts of aid to support their war efforts. l In Afghanistan, the aid infrastructure built over 20 years of American military presence that three Presidents wanted to end collapsed with the failure of U.S.-trained Afghan forces to repel the Taliban’s 2021 advances. Yet the country has received nearly $1 billion more in U.S. humanitarian aid since the Taliban’s takeover and absent a U.S. embassy to ensure that it is not diverted to the Taliban and other terrorist groups. l In Burma, U.S. aid finances all of the food and medical care for hundreds of thousands of persecuted Rohingya that the military regime forces to live in open-air concentration camps. l In northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—targeted for genocidal extermination by ISIS—remain in miserable camps unable to return home because of the Iraqi government’s refusal to clear out Iran-backed militias occupying their homeland.
— 267 — Agency for International Development benefits financially from extending and expanding these large-scale programs for years, even decades, ensures little scrutiny of these ever-increasing appropriations. The massive growth in “emergency” aid distorts humanitarian responses, wors- ens corruption in the countries we support, and exacerbates the misery of those we intend to help. The permanence of this assistance, particularly in countries where we have little to no in-country presence and must rely on U.N. agencies to self-monitor, has morphed into a co-governance scheme in which the U.S. govern- ment effectively finances the social services obligations of corrupt regimes that threaten the United States. These governments can then redirect scarce budget resources away from costly health and education toward financing their wars, sup- porting terrorism, repressing their citizens, and enriching themselves. Examples of this abuse are spread throughout the world. l Over the past decade, the U.S. government has expended $14 billion in aid to Syria where the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad—a close ally of Iran and Russia—skims nearly half of foreign aid through inflated official exchange rates, the diversion of food baskets to its military units, and procurement arrangements with compromised local contractors. l Yemen, once the breadbasket of the Arabian Peninsula, is now dependent on billions of dollars of aid as formerly productive Yemeni farmers cannot compete against “free food” while irrigation systems remain in disrepair, leaving the country to suffer from water shortages during long summer droughts and flooding during its rainy season. Iran-backed Houthi rebels divert substantial amounts of aid to support their war efforts. l In Afghanistan, the aid infrastructure built over 20 years of American military presence that three Presidents wanted to end collapsed with the failure of U.S.-trained Afghan forces to repel the Taliban’s 2021 advances. Yet the country has received nearly $1 billion more in U.S. humanitarian aid since the Taliban’s takeover and absent a U.S. embassy to ensure that it is not diverted to the Taliban and other terrorist groups. l In Burma, U.S. aid finances all of the food and medical care for hundreds of thousands of persecuted Rohingya that the military regime forces to live in open-air concentration camps. l In northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—targeted for genocidal extermination by ISIS—remain in miserable camps unable to return home because of the Iraqi government’s refusal to clear out Iran-backed militias occupying their homeland. — 268 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise In effect, humanitarian aid is sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes. Nefarious actors reap billions of dollars in profits from diversions of our human- itarian assistance, but so do international organizations. The WFP charges 36 percent in overhead while Oxfam International’s overhead has reached 70 percent in Yemen, reflecting the high costs of foreign staff, security, and logistics. With pow- erful lobbies in Washington, D.C., and in leadership positions throughout USAID and the Department of State, the aid industry adroitly exploits Congress’s dispo- sition to increase funding year on year to assist those in dire need but provides no evidence to justify the mounting budget requests. In 2020, USAID’s leadership fused formerly bifurcated food and nonfood emergency relief operations into a single Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance to improve the management of the agency’s largest portfolio, but this reform was not sufficient to address the problem. The next Administration should resize and repurpose USAID’s humanitarian aid portfolio to restore its original purpose of providing emergency short-term relief, prepare vulnerable communities for tran- sition, and do no harm in the following ways: l Work with Congress to make deep cuts in the IDA budget by ending programs that do more harm than good in places controlled by malign actors, such as in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan, where our aid is consumed by fraud, diversion, and partner overhead costs. l Require USAID and the State Department to devise country-based exit strategies that term-limit the duration of humanitarian responses and transition funding from emergency to development projects. This will require robust diplomacy to press host governments to integrate displaced persons in lieu of keeping them in expensive and dehumanizing camps financed by the international community. l Transition from large awards to expensive, inefficient, and corrupt U.N. agencies, global NGOs, and contractors to local, especially faith-based, entities that are already operating on the ground. This approach provides a far less expensive and more effective alternative for aid delivery. Local partners more ably navigate corrupt environments and are more likely to steer vulnerable populations away from dependence on aid toward self-sufficiency. l Require that BHA avail itself of existing IDA authorities that it fails to use, including to dispense with the cost-reimbursement model that disqualifies
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.