US House Speaker-elect Mike Johnson (C) reacts after lawmakers voted him as the next speaker of the house in the House of Representatives inside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, 25 October 2023. The House had gone more than three weeks without a speaker, after ousting former speaker Kevin McCarthy. Image: JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The government is now closer to its next deadline to prevent a partial shutdown than it is to the previous one that was avoided with a last-minute funding extension, with little progress having been made toward resolving the budget deadlock underlying both.
The House has spent most of that time in a deadlock of its own, after a small number of members dissatisfied with former speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for gaining enactment of temporary funding through November 17 on a bipartisan basis, having engineered a vote to oust him. Since then the House has conducted no floor voting pending an election of a new speaker.
That has prevented the House from taking up the regular appropriations bills for fiscal year 2024, which those same members have insisted on the House passing with only Republican votes as a way of staking a position ahead of negotiations with the Senate. Work even at the committee level has been largely stalled as well, including postponement of planned hearings last week on the effect on productivity and the cost of underused federal real estate due to offsite work by federal employees.
The Senate for its part has been focused mainly on approving nominations and other issues, but negotiations behind the scenes apparently have prepared that chamber to begin moving spending bills. That likely would start with a package of bills covering the VA and military construction, Agriculture, and Transportation-HUD; other bills also could be voted on in such groups.
However, as in the weeks before the September 30 deadline, there is little time left for passing bills, getting them through House-Senate conferences and into final form before the next deadline. The two chambers are far apart on funding levels and policy provisions in each of those bills.
A common tactic in similar situations is to enact a second temporary funding, lasting until sometime in mid-December. However, prospects for doing that are iffy, given the disruption in the House arising from passing the first one.
One option raised in the House would be to enact a temporary spending bill carrying until sometime in the early months of 2024, again generally keeping funding at fiscal 2023 levels. That was quickly set aside for reasons including a prior law requiring automatic cuts in agency spending if any temporary funding measure is still in place as of December 31.
More pressure to enact at least another short-term extension recently was added, though, as the White House sent an emergency funding request mainly for Ukraine, Israel and border security. The latter includes requested funding for an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judge teams, 1,600 officers to speed processing of asylum claims and 1,000 Customs and Border Protection officers with a focus on countering fentanyl.
The request also seeks funding to maintain pay of federal wildland firefighters at the higher levels in effect since last year. While the special funding provided in that change has now run out, the Agriculture and Interior departments have been able to maintain those levels temporarily through some shifting of funds. Their ability to do that however also is due to run out soon.
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See also,
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