The debate among Republicans over whether to punt government funding into the new year is heating up, as lawmakers race toward their next shutdown deadline.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) this week said lawmakers are running out of time until the Dec. 20 deadline and that passing an extension into early 2025 “would be ultimately a good move” because it would give Republicans and President-elect Trump “a little more say in what those spending bills are.”
But the idea doesn’t have total buy-in from the conference amid concerns from defense hawks and the party’s top spending negotiators.
“We’ve got to break this cycle, and this kicking it into next year is not good,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said on Tuesday. “It’s not fair to the new president, it’s not fair to the new members. They’re going to have to vote on this. I’m not okay with any of this, I would like to finish the bills.”
Top Democrats, meanwhile, have also expressed a strong preference for completing fiscal 2025 funding work by Dec. 20, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, declined to say if she and Democrats will support a continuing resolution (CR) if the funding talks fall through.
“My job is to fight like hell to get us to Dec. 20,” she said.
And Trump himself hasn’t publicly said what he would prefer, an opinion that will almost certainly carry overwhelming weight among congressional Republicans.
Passing a three-month stopgap would push the funding fight until Republicans control the House, Senate and White House. But Republicans also caution it would throw yet another hefty item onto their lengthy to-do list for the next Congress’s first 100 days.
“I’d like to get our work done,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), one of the funding committee’s 12 spending cardinals, said Tuesday. But he also noted that Congress was “running out of time” to hash out funding plans for next year before its last funding stopgap.
House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) also said Tuesday that he’s “not a big fan” of the stopgap idea, while Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), head of the subcommittee that oversees annual defense funding, said he’d prefer that lawmakers “get the work done before the next Congress.”
“It’s not good for the Department of Defense. It will cost us about $2 billion a month to operate under a [continuing resolution] with no new starts, contract expiration, inefficiencies within the department. So, it’s not a good way to operate.”
By contrast, hard-line conservatives have, for months, been calling for a CR into March, wary of being jammed with a sprawling spending package against the holidays.
In comments to reporters this week, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), head of the House Freedom Caucus and a spending cardinal, said he still “absolutely” supports the funding effort and added hopes “they put the SAVE [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] Act back in with it.”
Republicans had unsuccessfully pushed to pass the proof-of-citizenship voting bill as part of their initial plan to avert a shutdown in September that also would have punted Congress’s next shutdown deadline into next year. The tanked vote came amid pushback from conservatives opposed to resorting to a stopgap to patch funding, concerns from defense hawks about what the plan would mean for the Pentagon, and others in the party.
The House eventually passed a so-called clean three-month stopgap to keep the government open past September, but not without support from Democrats.
“Recently, Democratic votes were necessary to raise the debt ceiling, to avoid a default on the debt, and necessary to avoid closing down the government a couple of times,” Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said this week.
“So, if they’re willing to work on a little bipartisan basis — we know we’re not … the majority. We can get things done, but if they want a partisan bill, then they have to do it on their own, and they’ve shown no ability to do it.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that he is “supporting a top-line” agreement with the top members of the House and Senate funding committees at the table to “hammer out an agreement that’s consistent with the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act.”
“There should be no drama, since we have already resolved, both for fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025, what the top-line spending numbers should be, we just have to sit down and proceed in a manner consistent with what House Republicans and Senate Republicans have already agreed to do,” he told The Hill.
However, both chambers have put forward drastically different funding bills for fiscal 2025, as Democrats have accused Republicans of leaving billions of dollars on the table for nondefense programs in the House-crafted plans.
DeLauro also said that she’s been in talks with Cole, as well as Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
DeLauro said “the hope is that the Speaker will be persuaded” to get a long-term deal by Dec. 20. “We can do it; we have to have a willing partner.”
Mychael Schnell and Mike Lillis contributed.
