The House will vote as soon as Tuesday on a government funding stopgap that contains a slew of Republican spending priorities and would cut billions in energy and environment programs.
The bill’s fate could determine whether the government shuts down at the end of the week.
House Republicans’ continuing resolution, unveiled over the weekend, would extend discretionary funding through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 and cut discretionary nondefense spending by about $13 billion. Republicans’ goal is to avoid a funding lapse while buying time to focus on other efforts, such as advancing their budget reconciliation package.
But the measure is almost certain to draw opposition from the vast majority of Democrats, who are continuing to push for a shorter-term stopgap that would allow appropriators to finalize full-year fiscal 2025 spending bills in the coming weeks. They also want assurances that the administration will spend congressionally appropriated dollars.
The discord could potentially tank the CR and trigger a lapse in funding after Friday — or force congressional leaders to scramble in search of a new solution at the eleventh hour.
The House Rules Committee will prepare the bill Monday for floor debate soon after.
For Democrats, a big factor in their decision-making will be the fact that it would effectively reduce discretionary nondefense spending below current, fiscal 2024 levels.
Much of those savings would come from the zeroing out of previously enacted earmarks and the exclusion of billions of dollars in additional “emergency” spending that Democrats insisted on last year, according to House Republican leadership aides.
As a result, the bill would put a number of projects under the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, EPA and other agencies on the chopping block.
Those cuts include projects funded by earmarks that pulled from the clean and drinking water state revolving funds and federal emergency response funds.
Among the potential cuts are bipartisan disaster mitigation projects funded through $293 million of Federal Emergency Management Agency earmarks, POLITICO reported.
“Republicans have decided to introduce a partisan continuing resolution that threatens to cut funding for healthcare, nutritional assistance and veterans benefits through the end of the current fiscal year,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to colleagues Friday. “That is not acceptable.”
The office of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, said Saturday that the administration would have broad discretion to eliminate climate change, renewable energy and scientific research programs across EPA, Interior, DOE, NOAA and the Department of Agriculture.
Rescission of earmarks for Army Corps of Engineers projects related to managing flood risk, restoring ecosystems and other water infrastructure needs amount to a $1.4 billion, or 44 percent, reduction, according to DeLauro’s office.
Funds for the International Boundary and Water Commission would be cut in half. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service would effectively be cut by $30 million.
Included in the text is a $100 million increase for Interior’s Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund. An additional $147 million would go toward making permanent a salary increase for wildland firefighters enacted as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, according to a House Republican aide granted anonymity to speak candidly.
‘NO DISSENT’
The stopgap could pass the House if all Republicans vote for it. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and President Donald Trump have been working to ensure that even the most fiscally conservative Republicans, who generally do not vote for continuing resolutions, get on board. Trump took to social media Saturday to call on all Republicans to vote for the bill, writing, “We have to remain UNITED — NO DISSENT.”
On Sunday, one hard-line Republican who generally opposes spending bills had positive things to say about the GOP-led continuing resolution.
“Now we have the chance to freeze spending at current levels,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said Sunday on Fox News. “No omnibus, no great big bloated bill with all the … pages we haven’t read. No earmarks.”
Still, he said there remain a few Republican holdouts in the House. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has already been voicing opposition.
Johnson said he hopes Democrats will join them on the vote and dared them to vote against keeping the government open. Several Democrats could indeed vote for the stopgap to avoid appearing complacent in the event of a funding lapse.
But House Democratic leaders have signaled they don’t plan to help the GOP pass their bill. They will meet early this week to finalize their game plan.
“The first thing to do, in my view, is to make sure that there isn’t a full-year CR,” said DeLauro. “I’m not sure the other side has the votes, but that’s up to them.”
Even if the six-month funding extension passes the House, it’s not at all clear that it will pass the Senate, where at least seven Democrats would have to vote with Republicans to send the measure to Trump’s desk.
Senate Democrats say they’re still hopeful that a deal on fiscal 2025 spending can be reached. Republican leaders have flatly rejected that idea of providing assurances that the president will not continue to block or freeze appropriated funds.
“If they think they’re going to bring this in at the end, they’re not. We’re not going there,” said House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “We’re not restricting the president’s executive authority — period.”
More CR details
House Republican leadership aides over the weekend described the 99-page CR as containing the “absolute minimum amount of verbiage needed to continue funding.”
It does not contain any “gimmicks, emergency funding or disaster designations,” they told reporters. There are no authorizing riders, no earmarks and no joint explanatory report providing congressional directions for spending.
Programs that were extended in the last CR, in December, would be extended again. That would include the authorization for the National Flood Insurance Program, among others.
“We’re staying with basically a clean CR,” said Cole. “We don’t have time to get any deal done. We still think a deal [on fiscal 2025 top-line levels] is better than a CR … but we can’t have a situation where a government shutdown is threatened every two weeks. We have other things to do.”
The lack of a joint explanatory statement would give the administration and federal agencies more leeway to use their discretion in carrying out spending, something that Democrats have expressed concerns about given legally questionable moves by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to freeze funding and fire civil servants.
In a statement Saturday, DeLauro called the bill a “power grab for the White House.” Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called it a “slush fund” that would give the administration “more power to pick winners and losers.” Republicans in past years have said the same about Democratic proposals.
The legislation includes numerous technical and administrative tweaks. For example, it would ensure that transferred and repurposed funds from the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act that were intended to be one-time transfers are not extended. It would update levels for administrative expenses and projected fee collections for fiscal 2025 for DOE’s Loan Programs Office without cutting loan guarantees, an aide said.
The bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 set statutory spending caps for defense and nondefense spending. Surpassing those caps, or a failure to enact full-year spending bills by April 30, would trigger across-the-board cuts.
House Republicans’ stopgap would fund defense and nondefense programs each at levels roughly $3 billion below the fiscal 2025 statutory cap.
Mark Paoletta, the general counsel at the White House Office and Management and Budget, issued an advisory opinion last week asserting that the CR would not result in mandatory, across-the-board cuts because “a full-year CR itself is a full-year discretionary appropriations Act,” according to reporting by The Hill.
No disaster aid
Significant new disaster relief for California, Kentucky and other states recently hit by fires and floods will have to wait until later this year, as expected.
Murray’s office said in a bill summary that the CR “fails to provide additional funding for FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund.” A House Republican aide, however, noted the bill would fund FEMA’s disaster relief account about $2.2 billion above the fiscal 2024 level.
DeLauro’s office said without supplemental funding, FEMA’s disaster relief fund could be forced to begin restricting funds by late spring.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) sent Congress a request for $40 billion in disaster assistance last month, but Congress will only act after receiving an official request from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has not finalized its estimates.
The state’s entire bipartisan delegation sent a letter Friday to congressional leaders urging them to appropriate more funding to help recovery efforts after January’s deadly wildfires around Los Angeles.
Trump and a number of congressional Republicans have called for making California’s disaster aid contingent on the state enacting certain policy changes or on Congress raising the debt ceiling.
It’s not clear whether those demands will hold when lawmakers eventually move to approve new disaster dollars, especially as more Republicans have come out in favor of getting the money out the door.
“It doesn’t have to be part of the budget deal. Actually, really, it probably won’t be,” Cole said. “I have no problem with getting disaster aid to California; they clearly need it.”
