Jeff Merkley: 'Long Tradition' Of Appropriations Committee To Handle Rescissions

During a Senate Appropriations Committee markup meeting on Thursday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) spoke about rescissions packages.

Transcript

00:00Thank you very much, Chair. I'm again calling up my amendment regarding the rescissions,

00:04exemption, Merkley Amendment No. 1. There are questions that have arisen about this amendment

00:14from our previous discussion, so I wanted to address a couple of those. And one of those is,

00:21does this amendment block the type of rescission we saw on the floor two weeks ago? And the answer

00:30is no. The package regarded FY, earlier, FY22, 23, 24, 25, funding often multi-year funding. This would

00:42only affect the floor rescissions on things that are signed into law by President Trump. In other

00:50words, that we have agreed to on a bipartisan basis, that the President has agreed to, and yet it also

00:57leaves the door open for even the things that we pass on a bipartisan basis, even the things that

01:05President Trump has signed off on. It still leaves the door open for rescissions, but it just says

01:09send them back to this committee. These two bills we have today both have rescissions in them.

01:15This is the place where rescissions should be considered. It is the long tradition of this

01:22committee working together to tackle in a bipartisan way rescission questions that we have previously

01:30passed on a bipartisan basis. So this is essentially maintaining the precedent of this committee.

01:39does not affect the immediate additional proposals that will come from the President. I do hope that

01:45if we get additional rescission packages from the President that go to the floor, that they'll get

01:50referred to this committee and we'll consider those in bipartisan basis. I hope we'll do that, but this

01:54amendment does not affect that. That is a separate conversation. But this says going forward, for those

02:02bills we pass for FY26, that if there are rescissions, those will also be done on a bipartisan basis in

02:09front of this committee. And so I think it's very valuable for reinforcing the work that we have done,

02:15for strengthening the precedent that has existed over many decades, and I would encourage your support.