January 30, 2024: What to take from news about an emerging spending deal
We’re one month out from Congress’ next deadline to avoid a government shutdown on March 1. We walk through some of the latest news about the developing spending agreement and what it means below.
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What We’ve Learned about the Emerging Funding Deal
The continuing resolution (CR) in place currently funds parts of the government through March 1 and the rest through March 8. As you might remember, in early January, Senate Majority Leader Schumer and House Speaker Johnson agreed to topline FY2024 funding numbers—i.e., how much Congress will allocate for defense and nondefense items. Defense programs will receive $886 billion, while nondefense gets $773 billion. You can read more about that agreement in our January 8 update.
Last weekend, appropriators determined how they’ll split that funding among the 12 appropriations bills, but nothing is public yet. However, reports indicate the Agriculture-FDA bill will see a funding boost while funding under the Interior-Environment and Labor-HHS-Education bills is cut.
House GOP appropriators have also suggested that the 12 bills will not pass individually. Instead, the Speaker will bring three or four packages of spending bills to the House Floor. They additionally acknowledged that far-right opposition will likely prevent the House from approving the “rule” that allows the chamber to consider legislation at all. Accordingly, the House will have to consider these bills under suspension of the rules—meaning, ⅔ of the House must support the bills for them to pass and Members cannot propose amendments.
Here are two big takeaways from this news on the FY2024 bills. Because the Senate’s appropriations process has been bipartisan, we’ll focus on House dynamics:
House Democratic votes will be necessary to keep the government open—and House GOP leaders know this. Given that some far-right House Republicans are liable to oppose any spending bills, this was arguably already true. However, Republicans’ admission that they’ll need to use the suspension process indicates that they aren’t optimistic about reaching a deal that will make their Members happy.
Bills that need Democratic votes cannot include extremist riders. The spending bills House Republicans initially proposed included far-right policy riders regarding abortion, LGBTQIA protections, gun violence prevention, and much more. These were ostensibly meant to secure far-right Members’ support—an outcome GOP leaders now seem to believe is out of the question. These riders were already nonstarters for Democrats. Now there are reportedly cuts to the Interior-Environment and Labor-HHS-Education bills, which include key Democratic priorities. That, plus House Republicans’ admission that some of their Members’ votes cannot be won, likely means they’ll have less leverage with Democrats to extract concessions on riders.
As always, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback. We’ll continue to keep you updated as the March deadlines approach.