Congressional leaders on Sunday unveiled the long-awaited bipartisan bills to fund parts of the government for the rest of fiscal year 2024, setting off a sprint to avert the looming shutdown threat in less than a week.
The six spending bills fund a slew of agencies until early fall, including the departments of Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Justice, Commerce and Energy.
Lawmakers have until Friday to pass the legislation or risk a partial government shutdown under a stopgap plan President Biden signed into law this week to buy more time for spending talks.
The Sunday rollout comes as Congress is behind in finishing up its funding work for fiscal year 2024, which began five months ago.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday that both sides were able to reach a funding compromise that will “the government open without cuts or poison pill riders.”
However, Republicans are already claiming wins, touting cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the funding package.
The GOP-led House and Democratic-led Senate entered negotiations with vastly different bills this year, as House Republicans pursued much more partisan measures with steep cuts to government funding that went beyond budget caps agreed to as part of the debt limit deal brokered between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last year.
Conservatives had been pushing Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to put forward a yearlong stopgap funding bill, which would trigger automatic cuts to government spending, if Republicans didn’t secure concessions on partisan policy riders.
Those proposed riders include measures that target abortion access, the Biden administration’s orders on diversity and gender identity, and a host of others that have drawn fierce opposition from Democrats.
House GOP leadership previously tempered expectations for major conservative policy changes, with Johnson telling members last month not to expect “a lot of home runs and grand slams” in the bipartisan funding bills.
Still, upon release of the first tranche fiscal 2024 funding bills on Sunday, Republicans highlighted some changes notched in the bill, including measures they said would cut endangered species listing activities at U.S. Fish and Wildlife and another aimed at protecting guns rights of veterans seeking assistance with benefits.
Democrats, on the other hand, lauded securing money to “fully fund” Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides food assistance to millions of low-income families across the country. The measure includes over $7 billion for the program, a $1 billion increase above fiscal year 2023 levels as Democrats have pressed for more dollars to address a shortfall.
House Republicans said ahead of the text’s release that they’re already looking to fiscal year 2025 for a fresh start at shaping government funding for the coming year amid dissatisfaction with leadership’s handling of the annual appropriations process.
“There’s always going to be a frustration about the four corners negotiation because, at this point in time, you have members in the House that are effectively in the same position as senators with such a narrow margin,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) said earlier this week.
“Everyone has a unique need back home and everyone has a unique position and trying to negotiate this in a Four Corners setting. It’s not working. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work,” Cammack said, adding “there’s a commitment from the Speaker that moving forward on [fiscal year] 25 appropriations, that this will be an open discussion.”
Some GOP negotiators argued ahead of the rollout that…
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