Process May Be Cut Short

Leaders of both the House and Senate have said recently that they don’t expect Congress to enact more than possibly a few appropriations bills as separate legislation this year. Those few bills likely would include the defense and military construction bills. That means that the general government bill and measures covering most agencies might not reach final floor votes but instead would be incorporated into a stopgap measure called a continuing resolution that would take effect with the start of the new fiscal year October 1. Due to a partisan dispute on the House side, some of the bills might not even reach a committee vote there. Earlier there had been a general expectation that a temporary spending measure would last only until some point after the elections and that Congress would return for a lame-duck session to finish work on the budget. But the general expectation now is that there will be no lame-duck session, that the stopgap measure will carry until sometime early in the new calendar year, and that the next Congress and President will finalize spending for the rest of fiscal 2009.