President Donald Trump’s clawback of billions in funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting narrowly passed through its first hurdle in the Senate, but it still faces a rocky road ahead with dissent among the Senate GOP ranks.

Senate GOP leaders hoped that an agreement to carve out $400 million in global HIV and AIDS prevention funding will get some of the holdouts on board. However, doing so shrank the expected cuts from $9.4 billion to $9 billion.

But a trio of Senate Republicans joined with all Senate Democrats to vote against advancing the bill from the Senate Appropriations Committee, which required Vice President JD Vance to cast the deciding vote. 

Trump’s rescissions package would yank bank congressionally approved funding for foreign aid programs and public broadcasting. But some Senate Republicans have sounded the alarm and want changes made to the bill before it reaches the finish line.

The bill that advanced out of committee Tuesday includes just shy of $8 billion in cuts from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and over $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the government-backed funding arm for NPR and PBS.

Republicans’ successful test vote comes after huddling with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, who worked to shore up support and apply pressure from the White House to get the ball rolling on the bill.

‘We’re fine with adjustments,’ Vought said. ‘This is still a great package, $9 billion, [it’s] substantially the same package, and the Senate has to work its will.’

While concerns were still raised about other aspects of the spending cuts package during the closed-door meeting, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., believed that carving out the cuts to Bush-era President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) helped ease concerns among lawmakers.

But the changes didn’t sway all Senate Republicans. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, bluntly said ‘no’ when asked if the PEPFAR carveout helped gain her support and argued, ‘I’d like to do some legislating.’ 

‘What a crazy thing, what a crazy thing,’ she said. ‘What have we been doing around here? We did a reconciliation bill. We’re doing a rescissions bill. We’re doing nominations. Nominations are important, but let’s, like, legislate.’

And Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she liked the changes but ultimately decided to vote against advancing the bill through its first hurdle.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also joined in to vote against the bill. Fox News Digital reached out to his office for a statement on his decision to vote against the package. 

It now moves to yet another procedural vote, which, if successful, will open up 10 hours of total debate time on the bill and eventually set the stage for a vote-a-rama, where lawmakers on either side of the aisle can offer an unlimited number of amendments to the package.

But, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., made clear that he would prefer the Senate not make any changes to the bill.

However, that request already fell on deaf ears — as it did during the budget reconciliation process that unfolded in the upper chamber last month.

Those demands already have fiscal hawks in the House grumbling, but like the budget reconciliation process before it, an amended rescissions package will likely glide through the House GOP and onto Trump’s desk. 

When senior State Department officials set out to trim the agency in the ‘biggest reorganization since the Cold War,’ they couldn’t get a total headcount on employees — for months, they say.

‘It took us three months to get a list of the people that actually work in the building,’ one senior State Department official told reporters during a briefing at Foggy Bottom on Monday, defending the job cuts that detractors have claimed will damage U.S. diplomacy. 

‘They couldn’t tell you how many people worked here,’ the official said. ‘It’s sort of scary as a taxpayer and as a public servant to think that we don’t even know how many employees we have. This is a national security agency, you know. Who are these people?’

The reorganization will result in a department with about 3,000 fewer employees. Around half of those took a voluntary buyout, and the other half were given reduction in force (RIF) notices.

A handful of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s closest advisors evaluated over 700 domestic offices within the State Department, submitting RIF (reduction in force) notices to employees in those they found to be ‘duplicative’ or ‘inefficient.’ 

The idea, officials said, was to put a ‘maximum of 12 clearances on any piece of paper,’ meaning documents would go through 12 layers of approval instead ’40, 50 clearances.’

The department had dozens of different offices handling human resources, and when a new employee was hired, they were accepting faxed records on their past work with other agencies. 

‘It’s crazy that a department that’s tasked with so many critical diplomatic, national security functions, with a $50 billion plus budget is running its affairs that way,’ an official said. 

The investigation found three separate offices dealing with sanctions, two handling arms control issues. 

‘Some of these regional offices within this sort of functional civil liberties, civil society, bureaus of democracy, human rights and labor, population, refugees and migration each had their own regional offices in addition to the country desk, regional bureau, construct,’ the official said. ‘Every independent bureau and office had its own executive director, its own HR department, its own payments.We were making payments out of like 60 plus different offices.’

Rubio’s team maintains the reductions focus on nonessential bureaucratic layers while preserving frontline diplomacy. A Supreme Court decision in late June reopened the door for mass federal layoffs after a lower court had blocked the cuts. Legal challenges from unions remain pending, though the reorganization is moving forward. 

The officials shuttered a ‘diplomats in residence’ program, which they determined to be a ‘cushy job.’ 

‘State Department employees are getting paid to go hang out at Georgetown, and sort of recruit for the Foreign Service,’ one official said, ‘without any sort of metrics or accountability.’

They didn’t touch the country desks, those specifically focused on nations like Iran or China, and didn’t fire anyone from passport services or diplomatic security. They did not make cuts at embassies or foreign posts. 

‘We touched the people that are doing these sort of like wasteful, sort of mindboggling functions or places where we found natural efficiencies in combining two offices.’

Critics have warned that cuts to the diplomatic corps could damage U.S. presence globally and cede soft power to China. 

‘A climate change office is not countering China,’ an official shot back. 

The department also shuttered an office that had been tasked with resettling Afghan refugees seeking to flee Talliban rule and culled the Bureau of Population, Refugees & Migration.

‘That office was not doing work that was countering China or serving the national interest,’ the official said. ‘China has overtaken the United States in a number of those countries. So I would argue growth at the State Department has not coincided with a growth of outcomes for the American taxpayer.’ 

In another example, an official told of a Gulf state foreign minister who complained that the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under the Biden administration kept pushing them to unionize foreign workers. 

‘This created huge diplomatic tension with them,’ the official said. ‘That foreign minister was delighted and wants to work with us on shared prosperity and trade agreements that aren’t trying to to be patronizing to other countries about their domestic affairs.’

Still, the process has sparked palpable tension within the department. Employees gathered tearfully in the Foggy Bottom lobby to say goodbye, some displaying signs reading, ‘Diplomacy matters.’ 

Signs with messages like ‘resist fascism’ and ‘you made an impact’ were taped up throughout the department. 

A group of more than 130 former senior officials, including former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, signed an open letter expressing concern that deep staff reductions could endanger U.S. foreign policy effectiveness.

Some have seized on the results of a whittled-down State Department and foreign aid apparatus: A report by The Atlantic found the Trump administration had given an order to incinerate 500 tons of emergency food that had been purchased during the Biden administration as aid to be distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

‘It’s a little bit of a shame to see people behaving that way. You sort of wonder whether they had any interest in following the president and sort of, upholding their oath to listen to the commands of the people,’ one official said.

A former top White House advisor to ex-first lady Jill Biden was subpoenaed to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

Anthony Bernal, former assistant to the president and senior advisor to the first lady, was compelled for a July 16 closed-door deposition after missing a previously agreed-upon interview date late last month.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer’s subpoena letter to Bernal read: ‘The Committee seeks information about your assessment of and relationship with former President Biden to explore whether the time has come for Congress to revisit potential legislation to address the oversight of presidents’ fitness to serve pursuant to its authority under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment or to propose changes to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment itself.’

While the deposition is moving forward Wednesday morning, it’s not guaranteed Bernal will show up until he’s seen in the corridors of the House office building where the meeting is taking place.

Comer, R-Ky., is investigating allegations that Biden’s former top White House aides covered up signs of his mental and physical decline while in office, and whether any executive actions were commissioned via autopen without the president’s full knowledge. Biden allies have pushed back against those claims.

‘Original Sin,’ a book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson, positions Bernal as a fiercely protective aide who was dubbed the leader of the ‘loyalty police’ by other former Biden staffers.

His LinkedIn page lists him as currently working as Jill Biden’s chief of staff in the Transition Office of Former President Joe Biden.

Bernal was originally slated to appear last month for a voluntary transcribed interview, but he and his lawyers backtracked after the Trump administration announced it was waiving executive privilege rights for him and several other former White House staffers.

If he appears, he will be the fourth ex-Biden aide to sit down with House GOP investigators.

Longtime Biden advisor Ashley Williams appeared for a nearly six-hour transcribed interview on Friday, following a brief sit-down by former Biden physician Kevin O’Connor.

O’Connor, like Bernal, appeared under subpoena. His closed-door deposition lasted less than 30 minutes, with the doctor invoking the Fifth Amendment on all questions outside his name.

O’Connor’s lawyers said he did so out of concern for doctor-patient confidentiality. Comer, however, accused him of covering for the octogenarian former president.