Sen. Eric Schmitt told the White House budget office in January that he wanted to help it cut wasteful spending using a rare procedure known as rescissions.
Five months later, the Missouri Republican was put in charge of ushering President Trump’s $9.4 billion rescissions request through the Senate, where there was some Republican resistance to the process and to the proposed cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting.
“One of the things that we don’t often get a chance to do is to actually cut wasteful spending. And I thought that would be a worthy endeavor and something good to spend time on,” Mr. Schmitt said in an interview with The Washington Times from his Capitol Hill office Thursday.
That morning, Mr. Schmitt was celebrating the Senate’s passage of $9 billion of the president’s requested cuts, which will codify roughly 5% of the $190 billion in savings the Department of