The White House’s bill to codify some of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts is facing an uphill battle in the Senate, after the House narrowly passed it last month. Not only are some moderate senators wary of touching the bill, but the legislation, by law, must receive a vote by next week, or it will die. 

This bill to claw back $9.4 billion in congressionally appropriated funds is aimed mostly at PBS and National Public Radio; an anti-AIDS healthcare program, PEPFAR; and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Several senators have said they need to make changes to the bill before putting it up for a vote, meaning the House will have to pass it again if the Senate is successful. 

“We’ll have an amendment process,” Senator Thune told reporters at his weekly press conference on Wednesday. “It’s an open amendment process — a vote-a-rama type process — which I’m sure you’re very excited about.”

Senators Rounds, Murkowski, and Collins are just some of the lawmakers who have publicly said that the bill needs to be changed. 

Ms. Collins has been outspoken about her support for PEPFAR — something that will take a drastic cut if the rescissions bill is passed. The bill submitted by the White House cuts $900 million from the program’s grant side, where money is sent to nonprofit or nongovernmental groups. Ms. Collins says that it will have serious consequences for the millions of people who have been saved from death by the program. 

“When you look at PEPFAR, you are eliminating a lot of the prevention programs,” Ms. Collins — the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee — said to the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, at a hearing last month.

“We’ve seen literally 26 million lives saved through a combination of prevention and treatment. We can’t tell in looking at the information you’ve given us, because it’s not specific, whether the rescissions would harm our efforts to prevent the spread of tuberculosis or polio or malaria,” the Maine senator said. 

By law, there is only a limited amount of time during which Congress can consider a White House rescissions request. If the bill is not passed by Congress by next Friday, then it will fail. President Trump sent only one rescissions package to Congress during his first term, aimed at cutting healthcare for poor children, and it ultimately never received a vote in the Senate due to Republican opposition. Senators simply let the 45-day window expire, rather than take a vote on the measure.  

If one thing defined the first weeks of the second Trump administration, it was likely Mr. Musk’s tear through the federal bureaucracy and his unilateral attempts to cut funds without congressional approval, leading to lawsuits and the reorganization of federal agencies. The White House says that this rescissions package is, in part, an effort to codify some of those DOGE cuts. It is also a trial balloon for how future rescissions packages can be done. 

During an interview with CNN in June, Mr. Vought said that if the White House can succeed with this legislation, then it could send more to Capitol Hill. 

“We want to see how this first bill does. We want to make sure it’s actually passed,” Mr. Vought said of the rescissions package. “This is the first of many rescissions bills.” 

Mr. Vought warned, however, that the administration can still try to push forward with other spending cuts even if Congress does not act. He has long said that he believes the 1974 law limiting presidential impoundment powers, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, is unconstitutional. 

“Some we may not actually have to get Congress to pass the rescissions bills,” he said of additional spending cuts. “We have executive tools. We have impoundment.”