Congress races to avert shutdown
Lawmakers work to have spending bill ready days before funding expires next month
House and Senate negotiators of both parties are racing to reach agreement on a spending package to prevent a government shutdown April 28.
Members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees intend to have a bill ready the week of April 24, days before the stopgap funding for federal agencies is set to expire, House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing said Monday. The timeline is especially tight because lawmakers are scheduled to be in session only about a dozen days before the deadline of midnight April 28.
President Trump complicated their work by sending over a controversial emergency request for $30 billion in extra funding for defense programs and $3 billion for border security, including $1.5 billion for his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. He would partially offset the cost with $18 billion in unspecified cuts to domestic programs — a trade-off that Democrats and some Republicans oppose.
The spending bill will be the first major issue that both chambers of Congress face in the wake of House Republicans’ failure last week to reach consensus on their health care legislation. Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., canceled a vote Friday on the GOP replacement bill for Obamacare when he failed to win enough support among Republicans or from a single Democrat.
“They’ve got to re-examine how they’re trying to govern,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Friday. “They can’t govern from an ideological perspective.”
If early indications are right, Trump is not likely to get most of what he asked for in his emergen-
cy request for fiscal 2017, which ends Sept. 30. The spending package is likely to include some additional defense spending but not the border wall or the $18 billion in cuts since both those requests would doom the bill in the closely divided Senate, where support of at least eight Democrats would be needed to pass it.
“The president’s proposal would abandon months of bipartisan negotiations and break from the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, by redirecting even more money to the Pentagon by further slashing non-defense spending in fiscal year 2017,” said Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “This is not acceptable.”
Republicans will probably need support from Democrats in the House as well as the Senate since some GOP conservatives are likely to object to any spending bill that cobbles together funding for all federal agencies into one huge piece of legislation. Congress is supposed to pass 12 separate bills each year to fund federal agencies, but the two chambers have been able to agree on just one this year — the bill to fund military construction and veterans’ programs.
Congress has to get to work on Trump’s budget request for 2018; any bill they pass next month will fund the government only through Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2017.
Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Commit- tee, called Trump’s emergency request for 2017 spending on the border wall “a non-starter” and a “multibillion-dollar boondoggle.”
The Republican chairmen of both the House and Senate Appropriations committees have been non-committal about Trump’s emergency request.
“As directed under the Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse,” House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., said when Trump sent over budget requests for 2017 and 2018. “While the president may offer proposals, Congress must review both requests to assure the wise investment of taxpayer dollars.” Frelinghuysen said he’s optimistic that he and negotiators from both parties can “strike a balance.”