Biden and congressional leaders announce a deal on government funding as a partial shutdown looms

Table Of Content

• Speaker Johnson navigates 'mission impossible' to avoid shutdown, without clear plan
• Leaders in Congress reach agreement on spending levels in key step to avoiding shutdown
• With government shutdown looming, House and Senate leaders agree on spending levels
• Congress passes stopgap spending bill, preventing a partial government shutdown

Then, the Senate would act on the bill, but it would require all senators to agree on speeding up the process to get to a final vote before the midnight Friday deadline. Such agreements generally require Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to allow for votes on various amendments to the bill in return for an expedited final vote. Schumer said Tuesday he was hopeful of avoiding a lapse in government services. With the possible release of legislative text late Tuesday, the House’s 72-hour rule means that chamber would not take it up until late Friday, just hours before funding expires.

Speaker Johnson navigates 'mission impossible' to avoid shutdown, without clear plan

If lawmakers can reach an agreement on all full-year appropriations bills before 22 March as promised, the government will be funded through the fiscal year, which ends on 30 September. Appropriators will still have to finalize the text of the deal and Congress will need to pass the bills before the first government funding deadline on Jan. 19. The agreement is likely to enrage far-right House conservatives, who insisted on deep spending cuts and border restrictions as a price for their vote on a spending bill. On February 29, the House passed a short-term continuing resolution extending the funding deadline to March 8 for the first four appropriations bills in the November and January CRs, and to March 22 for the rest.[46] The bill passed the Senate as well on March 1, and was signed into law by President Biden later the same day.

Leaders in Congress reach agreement on spending levels in key step to avoiding shutdown

Still, some of the more conservative members of the House GOP have been critical of the spending bills, and many voted against the short-term extension Congress passed last week that avoided a shutdown and allowed negotiations to continue. Earlier this year, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced an agreement on the top-line spending levels for this year’s discretionary spending, which comes to more than $1.6 trillion. But that agreement didn’t address potential policy mandates placed within the bills. Before the agreement among congressional leaders, the caucus in a press release said it was “extremely troubled that House Republicans” were even considering such a deal that would allow Democrats to spend more than the cap limits allow. The Senate voted Thursday night to pass a $1.5 trillion omnibus bill that will fund federal government agencies for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2022, following in the footsteps of the House, which passed the measure the previous evening.

With government shutdown looming, House and Senate leaders agree on spending levels

The agreement includes an increase in Pentagon spending to $886.3 billion and it will hold nondefense funding at $772.7 billion, the Times reported. It will include $69 billion that was agreed upon in a deal between McCarthy and the White House. The deal that was reached was a $1.66 trillion agreement to finance the federal government in 2024, The Washington Post reported.

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Former President Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign committee ended March with $45 million on hand, federal filings showed Saturday, as he tries to close the fund-raising gap with President Biden. The Senate voted 68 to 29 to send the legislation to the House, which is set to take it up on Friday. The Senate vote came one day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to Washington and delivered a historic speech to a special joint meeting of Congress.

Biden signs package of spending bills passed by Congress hours before shutdown deadline - PBS NewsHour

Biden signs package of spending bills passed by Congress hours before shutdown deadline.

Posted: Sat, 09 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Overall, the two spending packages provide about a 3% boost for defense, while keeping nondefense spending roughly flat with the year before. That’s in keeping with an agreement that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy worked out with the White House, which restricted spending for two years and suspended the debt ceiling into January 2025 so the federal government could continue paying its bills. The Senate voted 77 to 13 to approve a short-term spending bill that would prevent a partial government shutdown at the end of the day on Friday. The House passed the bill earlier in the day, giving Congress more time to finish work on long-term funding plans. “By securing the $772.7 billion for non-defense discretionary funding, we can protect key domestic priorities like veterans benefits, health care and nutrition assistance from the draconian cuts sought by right-wing extremists,” he said in a joint statement with Jeffries.

The most conservative House Republicans opposed the earlier debt ceiling agreement and even brought House proceedings to a halt for a few days to show their displeasure. Many were surely wanting additional concessions, but Democrats have been insistent on abiding by debt ceiling spending caps, leaving Johnson in a difficult spot. In a letter to his Republican colleagues, Speaker Johnson advised that he had secured some concessions—including an additional $10 billion in cuts to the IRS mandatory funding for a total of $20 billion. Those cuts came from the nearly $80 billion promised to the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act. Those amounts had already been agreed upon, but the cuts would come over two fiscal years. Johnson conceded the spending levels "will not satisfy everyone and they do not cut as much spending as many of us would like," but he said the agreement puts Congress on a path to fight for more policy riders and spending cuts going forward.

Instead, the omnibus will deliver $728.5 billion — $32.5 billion more than Congress delivered in 2021, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The omnibus measure includes discretionary spending increases for both domestic agencies and the Defense Department. On the non-Defense side, the combined increases amount to a $6.7 billion plus-up, a figure that Senate Democrats noted was the largest increase in domestic discretionary spending in the past four years. If the House passes the bill, it will represent another significant bipartisan win for Biden, who has notched a number of legislative victories in the past year on bills that passed with both Republican and Democratic support. Some of the most notable were the Respect for Marriage Act, the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, passed in June, resolved the debt-ceiling crisis and set spending caps for FY2024 and FY2025.

In March, it spent just $3.7 million, the new filings show, compared with $11.4 million in January — and much less than the $29.2 million spent by Mr. Biden’s campaign in March. In other words, Mr. Trump’s campaign is guarding resources as it seeks to build a campaign war chest for the general election. The bill, which would provide nearly $50 billion in aid to Ukraine, now heads to the House for a vote where it is expected to pass before being sent to President Biden. "If Senate Republicans controlled this chamber, we would have handled the appropriations process differently from top to bottom," McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. One provision in the bill would provide for 12,000 special immigrant visas for eligible Afghans who helped Americans despite great personal risk to themselves and their loved ones during roughly two decades of war in Afghanistan. Without congressional action, the State Department could run out of such visas by the end of summer, endangering thousands of Afghans seeking safety in the U.S.

In 2020, Trump repeatedly pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the electoral votes for President Joe Biden. Pence refused to do so during the Jan. 6, 2021, certification process, becoming a target of the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol that day. It also overhauls the federal Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law that former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to use to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost. In addition to the Ukraine assistance, the measure provides $40 billion in new funding for states and tribal reservations to help communities nationwide recover from natural disasters, such as wildfires and major storms. The United States federal budget for fiscal year 2024 runs from October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024. Emerging from a meeting with GOP colleagues, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said he expected legislative text to be unveiled Wednesday and a vote in the House to occur by Friday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and congressional leaders announced Tuesday that they have reached an agreement on this fiscal year’s final set of spending bills. Now, the question is how fast lawmakers can get the bills passed to avoid a partial government shutdown. In a joint statement, congressional leaders of both parties confirmed that the House and the Senate would vote this week on a short-term funding bill to allow lawmakers more time to finalize full-year appropriations bills. The leaders said that negotiators have already reached a deal on six full-year spending bills, and the remaining six bills are expected to be finalized before 22 March. Under the United States budget process established in 1921, the US government is funded by twelve appropriations bills that are formed as a response to the presidential budget request submitted to Congress in the first few months of the previous calendar year. The various legislators in the two chambers of Congress negotiate over the precise details of the various appropriations bills.