Time is running out for spending bill
Government shutdown looms again Jan. 19
WASHINGTON – No one wants to shut down the government — or so congressional leaders in both parties keep telling us.
And yet here we are again, counting down the days until federal money runs dry for everything from the National Parks to food safety inspections to hotlines for veterans.
This time, the deadline is midnight Jan. 19. In the past five years, Congress has passed 15 short-term spending bills, setting up one funding emergency after another.
“No corporation would imagine failing to meet the budget deadline, and yet the biggest economy in the world does routinely,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan group that advocates for fiscally responsible policies.
The House and Senate used to pass one spending bill at a time, working across party lines to set priorities for space exploration, housing assistance, research and myriad other programs.
Now it seems that all lawmakers can do is pass short-term, stopgap spending bills that push hard decisions a few weeks or a few months down the line. And then they do it all over again.
“In the current environment, simple things are hard, and hard things are near impossible,” said Miguel Rodriquez, a former Obama White House aide and now an official with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
“We thought in ’95 and ’96, (when) we had two shutdowns, that you’d never see them again because the political results were so bad for Republicans,” said Stan Collender, a federal budget expert. “Now it’s kind of become standard oper-
“In the current environment, simple things are hard, and hard things are near impossible.” Miguel Rodriquez Center for American Progress
ating procedure.”
That’s in part because compromise on both sides is considered “collaborating with the enemy,” Collender said.
That was on display during the last government shutdown in 2013, when House GOP firebrands forced a fiscal showdown with President Obama over their efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act. That led to a 16-day shutdown.
It’s also because Congress has become so polarized that lawmakers can barely agree on anything; spending bills are often the only legislation with a real chance of passage, so lawmakers use them to wage war over everything else.
Abortion, health care and now immigration have all become flash points in fights that would otherwise just be about keeping the government open.
Plus, federal spending itself has become a debate, in large part because of the national debt. In 2011, Congress created a “supercommittee” charged with finding $1.2 trillion in debt reduction over the next decade. The bipartisan panel ended in stalemate.
So again, Democrats and Republicans have to agree on legislation to lift the spending caps before they can start negotiating the details of a bill to fund the government. That means Congress probably will not meet its Jan. 19 deadline — instead passing another short-term spending bill while lawmakers continue to negotiate.