The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congress work to avoid shutdown
House, Senate votes expected in advance of Sept. 30 deadline.
House DemoWASHINGTON — crats pieced together a temporary spending bill Tuesday that keeps the government running through Nov. 21 and replenishes funds for bailout payments to
farmers absorbing heavy losses as a result of the ongoing trade dispute with China.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has rejected suggestions from House liberals to try to use the measure to try to reverse President Donald Trump’s effort to raid military base construction projects to pay for the border wall.
The Senate, meanwhile, remains entrenched in its efforts to advance the 12 annual spending bills that would fill in the blanks of this sum
mer’s bipartisan budget and debt deal. The Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday approved three of those bills, funding transportation and housing, the IRS and the Treasury Department, and agriculture programs.
What’s next
House and Senate votes are expected well in advance of the Sept. 30 deadline to avert a shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has set a procedural vote today on an almost $700 billion measure to fund the Pentagon, foreign aid, and domestic agencies like the energy and education departments, but Democrats appear likely to filibuster the measure to protest what they say is a raid on health and education programs to pay for more border wall projects.
The next steps are unclear at best, and fears are growing that most of the government, including the Defense Department, may have to run on autopilot at current funding levels.
The maneuvering highlights the precarious nature of the summer’s bipartisan budget pact, which combined a twoyear increase in the national debt with a set of new spending “caps” to prevent the return of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts to both the Pentagon and domestic federal agencies.