WASHINGTON — Congress is staring down a funding cliff in mid-January and a second one in early February, but neither of those deadlines have inspired House and Senate leaders to broker agreement on the dozen bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.
Appropriators are concerned the upcoming election year and competing legislative priorities have pushed their work to the back of the line, increasing the odds that Congress stumbles into a partial government shutdown in the new year.
The lawmakers who work on funding bills are equally frustrated that leaders may simply lean on a third stopgap spending bill to keep the government funded for the rest of the fiscal year, throwing months of work on the dozen full-year spending bills out the window.
Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in mid-December that using a stopgap spending bill, also called a continuing resolution, to fund the government for the entire fiscal year would be “unprecedented and reckless.”
“We cannot just throw up our hands, act like nothing in the world has changed in the past 12 months, abdicate our responsibility to our constituents and box in our nation’s future by putting the government on autopilot,” Murray said.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the top Republican on the committee, has also rejected the idea of Congress using another continuing resolution, saying during a floor speech in late November the “temporary funding patches lead to harmful uncertainties, needless inefficiencies and wasted taxpayer dollars.”
“A year-long continuing resolution would simply fail to provide the resources needed to protect our nation,” Collins said.
A full-year stopgap spending bill would cut defense spending by $34.6 billion compared to what the Senate spending panel approved in its bipartisan bill, she said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said Tuesday that using a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year is “unacceptable.”
“It’s devastating, particularly for defense and we’ve got all of these wars going on,” McConnell said. “So we need to reach an agreement on the topline and get about getting an outcome as soon as possible.”
Spending levels in debt limit deal
Congress and the Biden administration agreed to spending levels for fiscal year 2024, which began back on Oct. 1, as well as fiscal year 2025 when they brokered the debt limit deal last summer.
The Senate Appropriations Committee wrote all 12 of its annual government funding bills to roughly that level and the committee approved them all following broadly bipartisan votes.
The House spending panel, however, wrote its bills more than $100 billion below those levels and added in dozens of conservative policy changes that infuriated Democrats.
Those differing spending levels are among the many issues that have delayed the House and Senate from heading to conference committees to hammer out their differences.
Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said before that chamber left for a three-week winter break that he agreed the spending bills should be written to the funding levels in the debt limit law. But he argued the Senate bills are above those numbers.
