WASHINGTON — Lawmakers averted a government shutdown 40 days before the election, but they face a new funding shortfall just ahead of the holidays and the inauguration of a new Congress and president.
Negotiators from both parties are trying to make progress on the 12 bills needed to fund federal agencies for the 2025 budget year.
Still, there is little time to pass these bills during the lame duck session; House members and senators are expected to be in Washington for only five weeks between Election Day and the end of the year, and the two chambers have yet to reach agreement on any of the 12 measures, known as budget bills.
A more likely scenario is that Democrats and Republicans reach a deal on a massive, comprehensive spending package by the end of the year, or they delay the issue again with a new continuing resolution (CR), which would extend short-term funding into the new year.
They need a new funding package before federal funding expires on December 20.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) insisted this week that the days of the pre-Christmas omnibus, packed with legislative priorities from both parties, are over.
“We’re not going to go back to the tradition of Christmas spending, and that’s the commitment I’ve made to everyone,” Johnson told reporters after the House passed a stopgap funding measure on Wednesday.
When asked if he would pledge not to put an omnibus on the floor in December, Johnson declined to answer directly: “We’ve worked hard to break that tradition … and we’ll see what happens in December.”
Congress is likely to find itself in the same situation it faced before, when it faced a hopeless year-end funding deadline: with a massive spending package, top budget officials say.
“I expect we will negotiate an omnibus,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., a member of the Budget Committee, noting that Johnson had said there would be no more CRs but that a new CR was passed Wednesday.
“The speaker, with all due respect, doesn’t have the ability to draw lines in the sand when he can’t even control his own caucus. They need Democrats all the time to actually get anything done, and we govern from the minority,” she continued. “And so I’m pretty confident that we’re going to get omnibus funding passed.”
Many more Democrats than Republicans voted Wednesday for the CR, which aims to prevent a shutdown starting next week, continuing a trend of the minority pushing legislation through the House that must pass.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., predicted the two sides could reach a deal and avoid a shutdown in December. But he said the election results would determine what ultimately happens.
If the government remains divided, that could lead to tense negotiations. And if Republicans win majorities in the House, Senate and White House, for example, they could push for short-term new funding through 2025, when they take power themselves.
“I always worry about [a shutdown] until we don’t have to worry about it anymore. But no, I don’t think so. I think we’ll get there,” Cole said of the possibility of a December shutdown. “A lot of it will depend on who wins the election and what the president-elect, whether it’s Donald Trump or the current Vice President Harris, wants to do.”
While it’s impossible to predict who will emerge victorious on Nov. 5, Johnson is fighting to expand the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and said Wednesday that he would like to remain speaker in the next Congress if the GOP manages to retain control. So he’ll have to tread carefully as he negotiates a new funding deal in December, hoping not to alienate rank-and-file Republicans whose votes he may need to keep the gavel.
Asked about an omnibus, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a member of the Freedom Caucus who has sometimes clashed with Johnson, said Republicans “will fight it, will make our case to the American people about how a Christmas omnibus is not going to be good for the American people, and it will create debt.”
And though he voted no on the CR on Wednesday, Roy praised Johnson’s funding strategy, blaming the 14 Republicans who thwarted Johnson’s original plan to attach a six-month funding bill to a Trump-backed bill, the SAVE Act, that would have required proof of citizenship to vote. After that plan was defeated, Johnson struck a deal with Democrats on the clean, nearly three-month CR that will carry the government through December.
“I thought what Chairman Johnson and all of us fought for on the floor was a noble effort to get it out of December, Goal 1 and Goal 2, to get the SAVE Act out and fight for it and see what happens,” said Roy, the author of the SAVE Act.
Some Republicans, he said, “decided to kill it, so they had to answer now that we have a CR until December. Congratulations, members of Congress.”
The full House has already passed five of the 12 budget bills for the new fiscal year. The Senate Budget Committee has sent 11 of the 12 budget bills to the House, where none have received votes. Identical versions of all 12 bills must be passed by both houses of Congress each year to fund the government, which rarely happens, with recent Congresses relying heavily on CRs and omnibuses to keep the lights on.
“What Leader Schumer should have done was bring the budget bills to the House floor. That way, some of them would have already been signed or gone to the president’s desk,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the top GOP budget advocate in the upper chamber, referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Conservative Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said he is deeply concerned that Congress will give up on passing separate budget bills and put everything into one big bundle.
“Of course I do. Everybody does, because it’s the same thing this city repeats over and over again. We do a huge budget bill right before Christmas that nobody ever really sees because the deal was cut by the Four Corners,” Donald said, referring to key congressional leaders: Johnson; Schumer; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
“They make a deal with the White House and everybody goes home,” he said, “and the problems continue in our nation’s capital.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
