The Trump administration promised that the $9 billion rescission package Congress passed this month on spending for foreign aid and government broadcasting would be the first of many. The White House is quickly looking to make good on that vow.

The Washington Post reported Friday that President Donald Trump plans to include federal education spending in a second rescission bill. The U.S. Department of Education is a monument to ineffectiveness, doing little in its 45 years of existence to boost outcomes for American schoolchildren. Laundering local and state money through a federal education bureaucracy is hardly an efficient mechanism for improving the nation’s public schools.

Trump is operating under the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which gives Congress the power to review executive branch decisions to withhold appropriated funding. If the House and Senate fail to rescind the money in question within 45 days, it must be distributed as intended.

The latest proposal is already stoking controversy among Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate. Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who voted against the first “clawback” bill, expressed her willingness to oppose additional legislation. “I don’t see the need for additional rescissions to be sent up by the White House,” Sen. Collins told the Post, arguing that the appropriations process would be the proper means to make any cuts.

Other Republicans worry that a second rescission bill will disrupt negotiations between the parties to avoid a government shutdown in coming months. “We’re trying to give (Democrats) what they’ve been asking for, which is a bipartisan appropriations process,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said last week.

That’s well and good, but why can’t the White House send Congress more potential cuts while Sen. Collins and friends work together to also identify potential budget reductions through a bipartisan appropriations process? The answer is that Democrats will never agree to any spending restraint. Witness their howls and apocalyptic rhetoric following the teeny-tiny budget cuts included in the recent legislation.

“The only time I have seen us reduce spending is through a rescission package,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, told the Post. “I’ll take a dozen of them.”

He has a point. If Senate Democrats want to shut down the government over largely symbolic shows of financial restraint, the consequences will be at their feet. The nation is $37 trillion in debt. Americans understand that our current path is unsustainable. Republicans and the administration must keep demonstrating to voters that they’re willing to take even small steps toward fiscal sanity.

— From Tribune News Service