Congress on Thursday passed legislation to keep the federal government open into March, approving the third stopgap spending bill in four months as lawmakers struggle to agree on long-term government funding plans.
The bill extends deadlines to March 1 and March 8. Money for roughly 20 percent of the government — including the Transportation Department, some veterans’ assistance and food and drug safety programs — had been set to expire just after midnight Saturday morning. The remainder — which funds the Defense and State departments, among others critical functions — would have expired on Feb. 2 without the new extension.
The Senate passed the legislation, 77-18, early Thursday afternoon. The House followed suit hours later, after GOP hard-liners launched a last-minute pressure campaign to attach partisan border security measures to the funding package. The votes send the legislation to President Biden to sign into law and avert a partial shutdown ahead of the deadline.
The stopgap spending bill, called a continuing resolution or CR, is intended to give lawmakers in both chambers time to draft and vote on a full slate of annual spending, or appropriations bills, for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.
“We have good news for America: There will not be a shutdown on Friday because both sides have worked together,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Thursday.
Schumer and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed to a $1.66 trillion appropriations deal earlier in January, covering all of what’s known in federal budgeting as discretionary spending. But lawmakers didn’t have time to negotiate and enact the finer details of the package before this weekend’s deadline.
That deal, which largely follows an agreement Biden struck with Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in 2023, would increase total spending this year by $28 billion over the previous fiscal year’s $1.63 trillion in discretionary spending — an amount that, accounting for inflation, represents a cut in real dollars.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/18/government-shutdown-bill-senate-house/