Washington Wednesday: Government transparency

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 23rd of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Before lawmakers head home for August recess, they managed to pass another one of President Trump’s priorities, putting cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency into law.

A bill Congress passed last week rescinds government spending on funds including for public media and foreign aid.

WORLD’s Leo Briceno reports.

LEO BRICENO: The rescissions bill is one of the first actual reductions in government spending that Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky can recall.

MASSIE: This is the biggest cut I’ve ever seen. It’s like the only cut I’ve ever seen. So, if we have more of them, that’s great.

On Friday, the bill cleared the House of Representatives by a 3 vote margin. It includes a $7.8 billion reduction to U.S. foreign aid programs and a $1.1 billion cut from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—the organization that provides financial support and policy direction to services like NPR and PBS.

Congressman Massie has opposed his own party in 1 out of 5 votes this year. But he told me he’s on board for rescissions.

MASSIE: I’m just happy about the process. It’s whatever we can agree to cut, we cut.

But agreeing on what to cut is tricky. Senator Susan Collins of Maine objected to $400 million in spending reductions to PEPFAR—a U.S. foreign aid program meant to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

COLLINS: You are eliminating a lot of the prevention programs.

Collins voted against the rescission bill. But because this kind of legislation is not subject to the filibuster process, the Senate passed it by a vote of 51 to 48. And the final version left PEPFAR spending untouched.

After the House passed the final version, I spoke with Congresswoman Lisa McClain of Michigan, the GOP conference chair:

MCCLAIN: Listen, the House is going to continue to do what the House does and we’re gonna put the most conservative rescissions package on the floor that we can put and the Senate’s gonna do what they do.

The next big challenge for Congress will be passing spending bills for 2026…after the August recess.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno in Washington.

BROWN: Hunter Baker joins us now…he’s provost of North Greenville University and a contributor to WORLD Opinions. Hunter, good morning.

BAKER: Good morning.

BROWN: Well, as you heard there, lawmakers are now codifying spending cuts from DOGE into law…Hunter, Republicans have been concerned about the federal debt for decades…so why do you think it’s taken them so long to tackle the behemoth [beh-HEE-muth] of government spending?

BAKER: Well, so in my lifetime, I think that we have only had a balanced budget or a surplus a handful of times. One was with Richard Nixon, and there were two or three others with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. We have much more often had problems with accumulating debt, with yearly deficits, and I think the reason that we don't fix it is, is very simple, which is that anytime there's an appetite to cut, there's an opportunistic opportunity to attack whoever wants to cut. I can remember Paul Ryan arguing for deficit reduction, and then there was an advertisement with a man who looked like Paul Ryan pushing a grandmother off the edge of a cliff. That's that's a common sort of a thing, right? Anytime you talk about cutting government, including reducing the rate of growth of the budget, you hear attacks on those proposing it.

So one thing that's important to note with the rescission package is that it is only $9 billion. We're talking about an infinitesimal, tiny amount of federal spending. But what is significant about this is that it is an action toward fiscal discipline, so maybe we're flexing the muscles little, a little bit on trying to actually figure out how to tame the budget.

MAST: Another big story out of Washington this week is President Trump’s decision to release thousands of documents concerning Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

CRONKITE: The apostle of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement has been shot to death in Memphis Tennessee.

The investigation goes back to before King’s assassination on April 4th, 1968, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to find dirt to discredit King. His family had mixed feelings about this week’s document release…King’s niece Alveda King thanked President Trump for his transparency, while King’s children Bernice and Martin III asked readers to view the documents within the larger historical context.

And they’re not the only ones talking about it. So Hunter, is this welcome transparency? An attempt to distract from criticism over the handling of the Epstein files? What’s your take?

BAKER: Well, I think first of all, you'd have to be naive not to view this as, to some extent, an effort to pull attention away from the Epstein controversy. There's no question, especially on the right, that people are talking about the Epstein thing a lot, and so I think that Trump is interested in pushing some other narratives out there. And in fact, you notice they said something about telling Pam Bondi she could go ahead and release information that she thinks is appropriate on the Epstein files. So clearly that's getting through.

Now, coming on to MLK, regardless of what the motive is. I think it's good that that information is coming out, as with the Kennedy assassination. I think the more that we have, the better. And I think that the King family is striking the right posture on this thing. On the one hand, they're grateful. They want to see that information come out and so that people can have confidence that what the government said happened is what happened. But they're also concerned, because it is true that the FBI was bugging phones and following King and perhaps trying to discredit him, they were worried that he was going to engage in communist activism and things of that nature. And so they're concerned that, as those papers come out, that there may be some things in there that cast Dr. King in a negative light, but that, having been said, I think that a lot of that stuff is stuff that we already know and have seen, discussed and presented in movies, so I don't think there's going to be any surprises in these files.

BROWN: One more story, Hunter, last week, CBS said it will cancel The Late Show with political comedian Stephen Colbert. (Co- bear)

COLBERT: It's not just the end of our show, but it's the end of the Late Show on CBS. I'm not being replaced. This is all just going away.

The network cited financial reasons, while Colbert seemed to imply the cancellation was political. Hunter, what implications do you see here for the direction of political commentary?

BAKER: Well, a lot of people are going to assume that the motivations are primarily political, or it has something to do with Trump's lawsuit against CBS, but I think that it may be much more of a financial issue. I spoke with an industry insider, and what she said to me is that she thinks that it has more to do with Paramount's merger with Skydance. In advance of a merger of this type, you want to try to clean up the balance sheet as much as possible, and getting rid of this huge money losing show is a big part of that. I think a lot of people are going to think that this was done because of politics. I actually don't think that's the case. Probably the least political of the late night hosts, which would be Jimmy Fallon, is currently having the lowest ratings. Maybe the one who is the most political would be Greg Gutfeld of Fox News, and he's on cable, and he has the highest ratings. His ratings are even higher than Stephen Colbert's. So I think that what's really going on is that it's the impact of streaming Johnny Carson's Tonight Show had an audience regularly of 15 million people. Stephen Colbert gets about 2.5 million a night, and so it just doesn't make sense to have a show like this that loses $40 million a year for a much smaller audience.

MAST: Hunter Baker is Provost of North Greenville University and WORLD Opinions Contributor. Thanks for joining us!

BAKER: Thank you.

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