(The Epoch Times)—The U.S. Senate on July 16 voted to pass $9 billion in spending cuts requested by President Donald Trump, including cuts to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
The measure passed in a 51–48 vote. Two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), voted against the bill. Although having voted against the bill in an earlier procedural vote, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decided to back the bill. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) missed the vote due to being in hospital.
The early morning passage of the bill came after a long voting series with a flurry of amendments from Democratic lawmakers.
The passage of the spending cuts, called rescissions, marks a major political win for Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).
Speaking after the vote, Thune said of the rescissions bill, “It’s a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue.”
Moments earlier, he said of what could become the first rescissions passed by Congress in 35 years, “Our country is 36 trillion dollars in debt. We can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. What we’re talking about here is 1/10th of 1 percent of all federal spending but it’s a step in the right direction.”
With its $9 billion top line in cuts, the bill represents one of the largest rescissions ever passed through the Senate under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It’s $400 million less than the original House-passed package, after cuts related to an anti-HIV initiative were stripped from the bill.
The Senate has historically been the most challenging hurdle for rescission bills.
Because alterations were made to the bill passed by the House on June 12, the legislation will need to return to the lower chamber for another vote.
PEPFAR and ‘Soft Power’
Most of the bill’s cuts—$7.9 billion—stem from rescissions of funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). These are linked to several controversial international social projects undertaken during President Joe Biden’s administration, identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Initially, a $400 million cut to the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program was included in the package, but this was cut in order to win over enough votes to pass the bill.
PEPFAR, initiated by President George W. Bush with the intention of ending the international HIV/AIDS pandemic by 2030, has been a flashpoint in Republicans’ fight to pass the cuts. The program focuses on HIV prevention, care, and treatment programs in partner countries, with the aim of reducing the spread of the disease.
McConnell and Collins tied their opposition, in part, to the cuts to USAID.
During a previous Senate hearing on the bill, McConnell said that such funding was important to the United States’ ability to internationally project “soft power,” power using non-military means.
“Over my years in Senate, the biggest supporters of soft power I’ve run into have been the military generals, who are fully aware of how much more costly it is to have a war than to prevent one,” McConnell said.
“Soft power, at very little expense, goes a long way.”
Collins echoed these concerns.
Office of Management and the Budget Director Russ Vought, a leading supporter of the bill within the administration, responded that the foreign aid cuts had been carefully chosen to solely target waste and abuse, telling the panel, “This is not a fade on soft power.”
“[Secretary of State Marco Rubio and I are] going line by line in each of these programs to articulate where we believe soft power could be effective, where we think that investment on the front end will keep us out of long-term, hard power conflicts of that nature,” Vought said.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The other $1.1 billion comes from funding cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees NPR and PBS.
Members of both parties have had reservations about these cuts.
“The bill will starve local and rural radio stations,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a speech on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) initially said he was opposed to the bill due to the impact these cuts could have on his constituents, but was later brought into alignment with the legislation after negotiations with the president.
Collins and Murkowski have also expressed skepticism toward the Corporation for Public Broadcasting cuts.
House Wanted Passage ‘As Is’
Several lawmakers in the House have indicated their preference for the Senate to have passed the rescissions “as is” without substantial changes, as there is a July 18 deadline for final passage of the bill after which the same cuts cannot be reintroduced by the president.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has indicated multiple times that he would have preferred the Senate pass the bill without revisions.
“The Friday deadline looms. We’re encouraging our Senate partners over there to get the job done and to pass it as is,” Johnson said during a Tuesday leadership press conference.
Other Republicans in the House echoed the sentiment.
“The Senate needs to do its job and pass the entire $9.4 billion so that we can set the stage for even more rescissions,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) said during a July 16 interview with Newsmax.
Responding to reports that the Senate would remove the cuts to PEPFAR funding, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times on July 15, “I think the Senate should take up the bill as we wrote it in the House. You know what we’re doing is really just codifying waste, fraud, and abuse [cuts] that the DOGE team found.”
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Va.) was critical of the Senate for the revisions.
“We’re aware that under normal circumstances, the Republicans in the Senate are not as fiscally as responsible as the Republicans in the House,“ Grothman told reporters. ”So this is disappointing but not surprising news.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
