Congress is on the cusp of averting a government shutdown with relatively little fanfare -- avoiding the eleventh-hour worries about whether government funding would continue that have marked recent spending fights.

The House today expects to pass a six-month spending bill with the Senate set to follow suit next week.

The Rules Committee yesterday set aside an hour for House floor debate, during which no amendments will be allowed. Senior House Republicans are confident the measure will pass.

The bill largely maintains programs funded in last year's appropriations law, with a 0.6 percent across-the-board increase to all agency budgets, including those of U.S. EPA and the departments of Energy and the Interior. It also provides additional funding for Interior and Forest Service programs aimed at wildfire suppression.

Members of the Appropriations Committee lamented that they were unable to complete full-year spending bills -- a scenario House Republicans laid at the feet of the Senate, where no appropriations bills came to the floor this year. But Republicans and Democrats said they were glad to be able to find agreement on the continuing resolution that will maintain government funding through March 27.

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) yesterday said he vowed early on to keep the CR relatively "clean" of extraneous policy riders or funding adjustments. But he suggested that anything left out of the CR could be handled by tacking a full-year omnibus spending bill during a post-election lame-duck session.

"I wanted to do a whole-year omnibus bill, but when the leadership decided on the CR, we decided to make it very clean and tight," Rogers told reporters in the Capitol. "And if that encourages people who needed something in a CR to want to push for an omnibus in the lame duck, that would not be a bad thing."

Rogers said he expected the bill to pass, although he would not speculate on whether a majority of House Republicans would support it. A number of conservative lawmakers are expected to vote against it because they believe it does not include deep enough cuts in spending. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday said the upper chamber would pass the bill next week.

On that schedule, congressional passage would come well ahead of the end of fiscal 2012 on Sept. 30.

No new policy measures, known as "riders," were included in the bill. But a rider in current law blocking DOE from enforcing light bulb efficiency standards will remain in place (E&E Daily, Sept. 11).

The light bulb rider was included last year at the behest of conservative Republicans who say DOE's rules would effectively ban incandescent light bulbs. Lighting manufacturers say that is not the case and continue to support and abide by the DOE rules, despite the lack of enforcement authority. But the industry did not mount an aggressive lobbying campaign to have the rider stripped from the CR.

The bill also includes a $100 million infusion for the controversial American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, operated by the U.S. Enrichment Corp. USEC is running a gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment demonstration project at the plant (Greenwire, Sept. 11).

Agriculture groups also have criticized the CR for effectively halting enrollments in four farm bill conservation programs: the Conservation Stewardship, Wetlands Reserve, Grassland Reserve and Chesapeake Bay Conservation programs (E&E Daily, Sept. 12).

Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), ranking member of the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees EPA and Interior, said he was pleased with how those two agencies made out in the bill, especially the wildfire funding increases. But he lamented that Democrats had to pick their battles in allowing the light bulb rider to remain in place another six months.

"There's only so many windmills you can tilt your spear at," he said.