Fear of partial shutdown rises amid August recess
House, Senate still at odds in proposals for funding government
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers broke for their August recess with work on funding the government largely incomplete, fueling worries about whether Congress will be able to avoid a partial government shutdown this fall.
Congress has until Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, to act on government funding. They could pass spending bills to fund government agencies into next year, or simply pass a stopgap measure that keeps agencies running until they strike a longer-term agreement.
No matter which route they take, it won’t be easy.
“We’re going to scare the hell out of the American people before we get this done,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.
Coons’ assessment is widely shared in Congress, reflecting the gulf between the Republican-led House and the Democratic-led
Senate, which are charting vastly different paths on spending.
The Senate is adhering mostly to the spending levels that President Joe Biden negotiated with House Republicans in late May as part of the debt-ceiling deal that extended the government’s borrowing authority and avoided an economically devastating default.
That agreement holds discretionary spending generally flat for the coming year while allowing increases for military and veterans accounts. On top of that, the Senate is looking to add $13.7 billion in additional emergency appropriations, including $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for nondefense.
House Republicans, many of whom opposed the debt-ceiling deal and refused to vote for it, are going a different way.
GOP leaders have teed up bills with far less spending than the agreement allows in an effort to win over members who insist on rolling back spending to fiscal year 2022 levels. They are also adding scores of policy add-ons broadly opposed by Democrats. There are proposals to reduce access to abortion pills, bans on the funding of hormone therapy and certain surgeries for transgender veterans, and a prohibition on training programs promoting diversity in the federal workplace, among many others.
At a news conference at the Capitol last week, some members of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction within the House GOP, said that voters elected a Republican majority in that chamber to rein in government spending.
“Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shut down temporarily,” Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., said.
Many House Republicans disagree with that assessment.
Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, called it an oversimplification to say most Americans wouldn’t feel an impact. And he warned Republicans would take the blame for a shutdown, “no matter what. So it’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”
But the slim five-seat majority Republicans hold amplifies the power that a small group can wield. Even though the debt-ceiling
agreement passed with a significant majority of both Republicans and Democrats, conservative opponents were so unhappy in the aftermath that they shut down House votes for a few days, stalling the entire GOP agenda.
Shortly thereafter, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy argued the numbers he negotiated with the White House amounted to a cap and “you can always do less.”
GOP Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, followed that she would seek to limit nondefense spending at 2022 budget levels,
saying the debt agreement “set a top-line spending cap — a ceiling, not a floor.”
The decision to cut spending below levels in the debt ceiling deal helped get the House moving again, but put them on a collision course with the Senate, where the spending bills hew much closer to the agreement.
Even as House Republicans have been moving their spending bills out of committee on party-line votes, the key committee in the Senate has been operating in a bipartisan fashion, drafting spending bills with sometimes unanimous support.
“The way to make this work is do it in a bipartisan way like we are doing in the Senate. If you do it in a partisan way, you’re heading to a shutdown. And I am really worried that that’s where the House Republicans are headed,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last week.
McCarthy countered that people likewise doubted whether House Republicans and the White House could reach an agreement to pass a debt ceiling extension and avoid a default.
“We’ve got till Sept. 30. I think we can get this all done,” McCarthy said.