WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate last week passed about $9 billion in federal spending cuts requested by President Donald Trump, including reductions to public broadcasting and foreign aid, moving forward on one of the president’s top priorities.

The 51-48 vote came after Democrats sought to remove many of the proposed rescissions during 12 hours of amendment votes. None of the Democratic amendments were adopted.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Republicans were using the president’s rescissions request to target wasteful spending.

He said it is a “small but important step for fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue.”

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, however, said the bill “has a big problem — nobody really knows what program reductions are in it.”

Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, joined Democrats in voting against the legislation.

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader, had voted against moving forward with the bill in a procedural vote, saying he was concerned the Trump White House wanted a “blank check,” but he ultimately voted for final passage.

The effort to claw back some federal spending comes after Republicans also moved Trump’s big tax and spending cut bill to approval without any Democratic support.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that measure will increase future federal deficits by about $3.3 trillion over the coming decade.

Along with Democrats, Collins and Murkowski both expressed concerns about the cuts to public broadcasting, saying they could affect important rural stations in their states.

Murkowski said in a speech on the Senate floor last week that the stations are “not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.”

Less than a day later, 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.

The situation is “a reminder that when we hear people rant about how public broadcasting is nothing more than this radical, liberal effort to pollute people’s minds, I think they need to look at what some of the basic services are to communities,” Murkowski said.

The legislation would claw back nearly $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which represents the full amount it’s due to receive during the next two budget years.

The corporation distributes more than 70 percent 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.

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

Kate Riley, president and CEO of America’s Public Television Stations, a network of locally owned and operated stations, said that deal was “at best a short-term, half-measure that will still result in cuts and reduced service at the stations it purports to save, while leaving behind all other stations, including many that serve Native populations.”

The legislation would also claw back about $8 billion in foreign aid spending.

Among the cuts are $800 million for a program that provides emergency shelter, water and sanitation and family reunification for those who flee their own countries and $496 million to provide food, water and health care for countries hit by natural disasters and conflicts.