Amid pressure from within their ranks to extend current government funding until next year, House Republican leaders said yesterday that no decision has been made on how to keep federal agencies running beyond Sept. 30.

Given House-side resistance to the Senate's acceptance of the $1.047 trillion spending level agreed to in last year's debt-limit deal, a continuing resolution (CR) that takes the government into fiscal 2013 appears all but guaranteed. But when to end that CR -- giving lawmakers until next year to agree on federal funding or tying appropriations to the George W. Bush-era tax cuts that expire Dec. 31 -- remains a volatile question for House Republicans.

Jennifer Hing, spokeswoman for the House appropriations panel, said via email yesterday that "the committee's position is for a short-term, 'clean' current-rate CR that will allow the government to continue to operate into the lame-duck session this fall." Yet she warned that "no discussions or negotiations have been otherwise held on a CR, nor have any decisions been made."

Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office offered similar counsel yesterday about the fate of the fiscal 2013 funding debate.

"Given Senate Democrats' inexcusable failure to pass a budget or a single appropriations bill, at some point we'll have to deal with the consequences of their inaction -- but no decisions have been made yet on how to do that," Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said via email.

The Democratic-controlled Senate won the support of all but two Republicans on its appropriations panel, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for adopting the $1.047 trillion spending cap set by the August 2011 debt deal as a guide for next year's agency funding. Twenty Republican senators last week urged Boehner to call up a CR at that level that lasts "well into the new year" as a means to "tak[e] the threat of a government shutdown off the table" while lawmakers battle over how to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts during the post-election session.

Nudged by their right flank, however, House GOP leaders have approved $19 billion in cuts below the debt deal's set threshold for fiscal 2013.

Those slashes raised significant alarms among environmental groups and other advocacy outlets that support U.S. EPA, Energy Department and Interior Department investments in natural resources and public health. The same activists already are ramping up their efforts to neutralize the so-called sequester, across-the-board cuts required by the debt deal that are set to take effect in January (E&E Daily, July 17).

Although the length of the coming House CR remains undetermined, Democratic appropriators yesterday lamented what their leader described as a decision to "indefinitely" delay a markup of the Republicans' bill to fund the Labor Department and health programs for fiscal 2013.

"This is by far the most partisan appropriations bill we have seen this year and a stark departure from the bipartisan cooperation we've experienced up until this point," the senior House Democratic appropriator, Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington, said in a statement.

The postponed GOP legislation includes language that blocks the Mine Safety and Health Administration from moving forward with proposed regulations aimed at limiting the spread of black lung disease among coal miners (E&ENews PM, July 17).