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Music Hey everybody. I'm Megan McCarty Carrillo. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today makes sense.

And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thank you everyone for joining us. It is Thursday, July the 17th.

Today we're going to get into some news, then wrap things up by celebrating some wins.

So, Kimberly, what's on the agenda today? What caught your eye?

I work in public media, so of course I can't ignore the fact that, eke. Yeah, the Senate passed that rescissions package, which as, you know, everybody who's been listening to our podcasts knows. And if you've been listening to any podcast ads on or underwriting or anything, you know that we're going to be, lots of public media stations across the country are going to be affected by this.

There's a ton of foreign aid cuts in there as well.

But as I raised earlier this week, one of the bigger issues, I think, even then the fact that, you know,

yes, it could potentially affect public radio stations all over the country, is what this means for the appropriations process.

And just to recap, normally to fund the government, the Congress passes a series of appropriations bills that says,

here is what the federal government needs to spend money on, and here's how much money you can spend on fill in the blank, fill in the blank, fill in the blank.

And the president has to sign it into law.

In order to get it, pass the Senate filibuster, you need at least 60 votes in the Senate, which means the process usually has to be bipartisan.

Now, that process has been broken for years, for sure. This is why we've had continuing

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