U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who was criticized for eventually voting in favor of President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill after expressing objections to many aspects of the legislation, announced Wednesday that she would not vote in favor of President Trump’s rescissions package.
This time the Senator held her ground, though the bill passed without her and now heads back to the House, which must pass it by Friday.
The matter of which specific rescissions the House will be signing off on remains unclear, ambiguity that triggered Murkowski’s problem with the bill.
Explaining her vote, the Senator said “the problem is that OMB has never provided the details that would normally be part of this process.”
Chief among Murkowski’s “several concerns” was that the Trump package failed to deliver “that very clear, very transparent explanation about the programs going to be cut as a result of the measure.”
We are lawmakers. Our responsibility is to legislate, not to shrug our shoulders and take direction from the White House. pic.twitter.com/gf6rGYQCY1
— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) July 16, 2025
Before the vote, the Alaskan Senator added: “I haven’t been given the comfort, if you will, that we’re not impacting maternal and child health. That we’re not impacting HIV/AIDS, we’re not impacting nutrition programs and programs related to tuberculosis, malaria, polio, neglected tropic disease, pandemic prevention and family planning. I think we are entitled to have that level of detail when these funds that we have authorized, that we have appropriated to, are now being clawed back. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
The Senator concluded her pre-vote 5-minutes on the floor with a warning: “We’re lawmakers, we should be legislating. What we’re getting now is a direction from the White House and being told ‘this is the priority, we want you to execute on it, we’ll be back with you on another round.’ I don’t accept that.”
Note: Murkowski and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) were the only two Senate Republicans who voted against the rescissions package, which claws back more than $9 billion in federal funding already appropriated by Congress ($8.3 billion for foreign aid, $1.1 billion for public broadcasting). The bill passed 51 to 48.