WASHINGTON>> The House was expected late Thursday to approve President Donald Trump’s request to claw back about $9 billion for public broadcasting and foreign aid as Republicans target institutions and programs they view as bloated or out of step with their agenda.

The White House had described the package as a test case and said that if Congress went along, more would come. The House’s approval would mark the first time in decades that a president has successfully submitted a rescissions request to Congress. Trump undertook a similar effort in his first term, but the bill faltered in the Senate.

Opponents voiced concerns not only about the programs targeted but about Congress ceding its spending powers to the executive branch as investments approved on a bipartisan basis are being subsequently canceled on party-line votes. No Democrats supported the measure when it passed the Senate, 51-48, early Thursday.

Two Republicans also voted no.

The House has approved a previous version of the bill. But it now needs to take up the version that passed the Senate before it can be sent to Trump’s desk for his signature.

“We need to get back to fiscal sanity, and this is an important step,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters shortly after the chamber opened.

The package cancels about $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and nearly $8 billion for a variety of foreign aid programs, many designed to help countries where drought, disease and political unrest endure.

The effort to claw back a sliver of federal spending comes just weeks after Republicans also muscled through Trump’s tax and spending cut bill without any Democratic support. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that measure will increase the U.S. debt by about $3.3 trillion over the coming decade.

The cancellation of $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting represents the full amount it is due to receive during the next two budget years.

The White House says the public media system is politically biased and an unnecessary expense.

The corporation distributes more than two-thirds of the money to more than 1,500 locally operated public television and radio stations, with much of the remainder assigned to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service to support national programming.

Democrats were unsuccessful in restoring the cut in the Senate.

Lawmakers with large rural constituencies have voiced particular concern about what the cuts to public broadcasting could mean for some local public stations in their state.

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.”

Later in the day Tuesday, as the Senate debated the bill, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the remote Alaska Peninsula, triggering tsunami warnings on local public broadcasting stations that advised people to get to higher ground.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said he secured a deal from the White House that some money administered by the Interior Department would be repurposed to subsidize Native American public radio stations in about a dozen states.