Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the stations are “not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.”
On the foreign aid cuts, the White House argued that they would incentivize other nations to step up and do more to respond to humanitarian crises and that the rescissions best served the American taxpayer.
Democrats argued that the Republican administration’s animus toward foreign aid programs would hurt America’s standing in the world and create a vacuum for China to fill. They also expressed concerns that the cuts would have deadly consequences for many of the world’s most impoverished people.
“With these cuts, we will cause death, spread disease and deepen starvation across the planet,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.