Senate Clears Stopgap, Setting Up December Spending Brawl (1)

President Joe Biden will soon sign a short-term funding bill to keep the government operating through Dec. 20, staving off a shutdown and setting lawmakers up for a spending showdown with a deadline just a few days before Christmas.

The legislation is now headed to the president’s desk after Senators cleared the measure by a vote of 78-18 this evening. The House earlier Wednesday passed the stopgap bill by a vote of 341-82.

Lawmakers were under pressure to pass a bill before the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Many are also eager to return to their districts to campaign before the November elections when control of both chambers is at stake.

The measure maintains funding at current funding levels with a few exceptions. The most notable is an extra $231 million for the Secret Service to protect presidential candidates. The agency is allowed to spend money at a faster rate but the bill also stipulates the Secret Service must cooperate with the bipartisan House task force investigating the two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said there will be no ‘Christmas omnibus’ this year.

Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg

The stopgap excludes an extra $10 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) originally included in his initial partisan stopgap to fund the government. Johnson said at a weekly leadership press conference that the plan is to “handle a lot of this in the lame-duck” spending negotiations.

Lawmakers will return to Washington after the elections when they must hammer out compromises on spending bills for the remainder of the upcoming fiscal year. In the past lawmakers have packaged the appropriations bills into a single or several large spending measures, referred to as an omnibus or minibus bills.

Johnson, however, said this year there will not be a “Christmas omnibus.” The speaker also said he “hopes” Congress won’t have to pass minibuses to fund the government long term.

Skeptical Appropriators

Appropriators are skeptical they can avoid such larger spending packages. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor-HHS-Education said he doesn’t “see how that’s possible” given the short time frame between when lawmakers return to Washington after the elections and the Dec. 20 funding deadline.

The spending deal in December, whatever it is, “depends on who the next president is and what they want” and “what the distribution of power in Congress is,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), told reporters after a closed-door House GOP conference meeting.

Cole said he could see Congress passing minibus bills but said it was ultimately up to whatever the president-elect wants: “That’s above my pay grade.”