The U.S. Congress today finally adopted the roughly $9 billion in public spending cuts that the White House and the DOGE commission under former chief Elon Musk had been pushing for, funds that were primarily earmarked for international aid.

The text was adopted by the House of Representatives by a vote of 216 to 213 (including those of two Republican members) and Donald Trump can now ratify it before the deadline he had until this evening.

The DOGE committee had identified those cuts as involving nearly $8 billion originally earmarked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the remainder to be allocated primarily to public media outlets NPR and PBS.

The Trump administration subsequently asked Congress to rescind these funds, which it would otherwise have been forced to spend.

“That’s what the American people voted for,” Republican Rep. Tom Emmer, a key House official, said before the passage.

The cuts originally included the global Pepfar AIDS program for which $400 million was earmarked, but moderate Republican senators secured the withdrawal of that section from the text.

Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday downplayed the impact of those cuts, hailing them as a necessary first step.

“Here we’re talking about 1/10th of 1 percent of all federal spending,” he told reporters. “When you’re $36,000 billion in debt, you ought to do something,” the South Dakota senator added.

In June, the Republican president expressed satisfaction at recovering $9 billion “that was earmarked for a wasteful foreign aid.”

He had also railed against the public radio network NPR and the also public television network PBS, for being highly biased against Republicans. The two public media outlets are in danger of losing $1.1 billion that was intended for them.

The US Constitution provides that only Congress has the power to appropriate federal public funds. The text adopted by Congress is the first of what Republicans have presented as a possible series of legislative packages codifying the spending cuts suggested by Doge and requested by the White House, even though these funds had previously been approved by Congress.