World’s Most Biased Headline or World’s Most Misleading Headline?

Even though it did not do much to slow the growth of federal spending in fiscal year 2026 and beyond, I was glad to see Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill get enacted.

If nothing else, it saved the country from a big, automatic tax increase next year.

Now there’s another fiscal fight in Washington. Lawmakers are squabbling over whether to approve Trump’s plan to rescind about $9 billion of spending for the current 2025 fiscal year.

To some extent, the rescission package is too small to care about. The burden of federal spending this year is about $7 trillion, so getting rid of $9 billion is way less than one percent of the budget. Heck, it’s not even 2/10ths of one percent of total federal spending.

Indeed, it’s almost impossible to see the impact of the rescission in this chart I created using CBO data.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the Washington Post, which was authored by Theodoric Meyer. As you can see, what he wrote was straightforward and balanced.

But notice the absurd headline!

The Senate voted Tuesday to advance President Donald Trump’s request to claw back $9 billion… The vote was 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie… The rescissions bill is a top priority for the Trump Administration… Tuesday’s vote was a first step toward passing the bill. …Congress must send the bill to Trump’s desk by Friday or the administration will be forced to release the funds. …If the bill passes, it would be the first rescissions package that Congress has passed at a president’s request in decades.

Knowing a bit about journalism, it is very unlikely that Meyer concocted that headline. Presumably, it was an editor.

But whoever decided to use “slash” must not be very good at math.

Even if we compare the rescission to the narrow slice of the budget known as “domestic discretionary” rather than overall spending, there is no “slash.”

There’s not even a cut.

To be fair, the headline could have been accurate if it specified that the rescission package would “slash” foreign aid and government-run media (NPR and CPB).

Those are the only two spending categories (out of hundreds and hundreds) that actually take a hit.

And that type of journalistic honesty would correctly put the focus on whether foreign aid plays a useful role (it doesn’t) and whether government-run media is a wise way to spending money (it isn’t).

P.S. Reagan pushed through a far bigger rescission package in 1981, further solidifying his record of easily being the most fiscally prudent president since the end of World War II.