But that’s less of an extension than it seems: The House and Senate are in session together for only six days between Friday and March 1, and for 10 days between Friday and March 8. In those windows, lawmakers need to pass a series of more complicated, longer-term bills to fund the government for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
The budget talks are shaping up to culminate with a dramatic conclusion: President Biden is set to give his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on March 7, a day before the government would shut down, unless lawmakers act to pass funding bills or extend the deadlines again.
“We have very little time, and the House and Senate calendars don’t necessarily match,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), an Appropriations Committee leader, told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “Having said that, the bottom line is the appropriators will get the job done if we’re just given enough time and an opportunity.”
The expected vote Tuesday in the Senate should keep lawmakers on track to prevent a shutdown this weekend, though the House will probably have to rely on Democratic votes to pass short-term spending legislation after the Senate adopts it. But the longer-term spending measures will pose problems in both chambers.
Congress in November averted a government shutdown with a measure that staggered federal funding on two deadlines. Money for roughly 20 percent of the government — including the Transportation Department, some veterans’ assistance, and food and drug safety programs — runs out at the end of the day Friday, just after midnight. The rest — including for the Defense and State Departments — expires Feb. 2.
Schumer and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reached a $1.66 trillion 2024 funding deal earlier in January, but to enact it Congress must pass 12 annual spending, or appropriations, bills covering different parts of the federal government.
That process could in theory move fast in the House, where leaders can exert more control over the floor and ram legislation through rapidly. But far-right members of the GOP conference, furious with Johnson’s deal with Schumer, could throw obstacles in the way, slowing the path to passage and jamming the government up against yet another potential shutdown.
“Even now, the hard right, amazingly, is demanding that the speaker walk away from the agreement that [congressional leaders] made on appropriations top-lines,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “That’s simply ridiculous, as even many Republicans recognize. And it goes to show you how unserious — how incapable — the hard right is at doing the hard work of governing. But if the hard right’s tactics in the House have proved one thing, it’s that bullying almost never works. It ain’t working for them.”
The Senate, under its normal procedures, regularly takes at least a week to pass a bill. Leaders in the upper chamber would need cooperation from all 100 senators to hasten the process and pass each measure before the deadline, or bundle several of the appropriations together into one piece of legislation instead. (That method, though, could cause its own problems in the House, where many Republican legislators are passionate about “single-subject bills.”)
“Stopgap funding bills create inefficiencies within government that only serve to waste American taxpayer dollars and sow uncertainty in the economy,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), an Appropriations subcommittee chair, said in a statement. “I sincerely hope this is the last continuing resolution for this fiscal year, so we can provide all Americans with the confidence that their government will remain open and functioning.”
This round of budget haggling wasn’t supposed to be this complicated. Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) agreed to a broad government funding deal in the spring of 2023 as part of negotiations to suspend the U.S. debt limit. That was intended to prevent Congress from needing stopgap funding legislation — called a continuing resolution or CR — to keep the government open when the fiscal year ended in September.
But far-right House Republicans rejected that agreement, then ousted McCarthy from the speakership when he leaned on Democrats to pass a CR in late September that did not cut spending. (McCarthy resigned from Congress at the end of 2023.)
Johnson, just three weeks into his speakership, pushed through another CR — the law that is about to expire — on Nov. 15. Now he’s facing conservative backlash similar to that which McCarthy faced in September and October.
He’ll probably have to rely on Democrats to pass all of the upcoming spending bills, as members of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus threaten to throw up procedural hurdles on the House floor.
“This is what surrender looks like,” the group said in a statement about the advancing CR.
That stance has generated friction within the raucous Republican conference. Diaz-Balart said the group of lawmakers blocking the legislation “may call themselves what they like, but they’re not conservatives.”
Paradoxically, as a result of the Freedom Caucus’s hurdles, Republican leaders have had to agree to spending terms more favorable to Democrats, because neither McCarthy nor Johnson could rely on his own party for support.
“What they end up doing is making the House go further left,” Diaz-Balart said. “It’s ironic that it’s folks who are self-proclaimed conservatives who forced the most conservative speaker in the history of this country to look for Democratic votes.”
