Congressional leaders unveiled a bipartisan plan Wednesday to avert a looming partial government shutdown at midnight Saturday.
Under the deal, lawmakers will work to pass a stop-gap resolution to extend the deadline to properly fund the government to March 8 for six of the 12 necessary spending bills and March 22 for the other six.
“We are in agreement that Congress must work in a bipartisan manner to fund our government,” all four congressional leaders and the four top appropriators said in a joint statement Wednesday evening.
Previously Congress had a deadline of March 1 to get the first batch of spending bills done and March 8 to finish off the rest.
The eight leaders also signaled that negotiators came to some sort of understanding on the contours of those first six appropriation bills, without providing specifics.
Every new fiscal year, which begins in October, Congress is tasked with funding the government, which it does via 12 appropriations bills that are typically stuffed together in some sort of omnibus.
It’s been over five months and Congress has yet to officially meet this obligation amid deep turmoil in the lower chamber.
Early last month, congressional leaders rolled out a deal on the top-line numbers, which had long been a sticking point. Those numbers entail $886.3 billion for defense and $772.7 billion in various nondefense programs, including a $69 side deal.
But Congress has struggled to meet its two-pronged deadline due, in part, to quarreling over policy riders that would get attached to the appropriation bills as well as some logistical snarls.
The four congressional leaders and four top appropriators said an extended spending patch is needed to give “adequate time to execute on this deal in principle, including drafting, preparing report language, scoring, and other technical matters.”
The first six appropriations bills due by March 8 are “Agriculture-FDA, Commerce-Justice and Science, Energy and Water Development, Interior, Military Construction-VA, and Transportation-HUD.”
The next tranche of bills due March 22 is “Defense, Financial Services and General Government, Homeland Security, Labor-HHS, Legislative Branch, and State and Foreign Operations.”
President Biden met with the four congressional leaders Tuesday to discuss the spending flap and impress upon them the need to avoid a shutdown and pony up aid to war-torn Ukraine.
Should Congress fail to pass a spending patch it could render Biden the first president to deliver a State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress during a partial government shutdown.
Biden is set to deliver the address on March 7.
Perhaps the real deadline for lawmakers is April 30 to adequately fund the government.
During the debt ceiling battle last year, Congress passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which included a provision to automatically slash non-defense programs by roughly 5% and the military by about 1% if the government’s lights are kept on via CR past that deadline.
Some conservatives have mused about leveraging those automatic cuts to lock down deeper clawbacks in government spending.
Government funding has been at the heart of bitter infighting amongst House Republicans for months.
At the start of fiscal year 2024, a band of eight Republicans led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) joined with a solid bloc of Democrats to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) after he brought up a CR to stave off a shutdown.
That paved the way for Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) ascension, who has notably seen multiple CRs enacted under his watch.
