Congress passed, and Biden signed, another set of six bills this month worth $459 billion to fund the rest of the government.
Without new legislation, many agencies will shutter at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. In the House, a vote could come as soon as Friday morning, pushing the more deliberate Senate up against a ticking countdown clock.
“I think the final product is something that we were able to achieve a lot of key provisions in and wins and move in a direction that we want even with our tiny, historically small majority,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday.
The legislation comes late in Congress’s budget calendar, with the 2024 fiscal year half over. But Congress has not passed all of its appropriations bills on time since 1997, according to the Pew Research Center, often relying instead on stopgap funding bills called continuing resolutions, or CRs.
Even if Congress doesn’t finish work by the deadline, the effects of a shutdown might be minimal as long as lawmakers act before Monday: Many federal workers at unfunded agencies would be off for the weekend anyway.
But if a closure goes longer, more than half of IRS employees would face furloughs at the height of tax filing season. Border Patrol officers and about 1.3 million active-duty military service members would remain on the job without pay. So would Transportation Security Administration screeners, many of whom called in sick as a protest after a previous shutdown dragged on for weeks, sparking nationwide travel delays.
“No one should want a shutdown. No one should cause a shutdown. Let’s pull together and get this done,” Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the chief Democratic negotiator, said Wednesday. “Please excuse the former preschool teacher in me, but here’s the lesson I hope everyone learned when we pass these last six bills: When we listen to each other, and to the American people instead of the loudest voices on the far right, we can work together, and actually pass meaningful bills that help people back home.”
Funding the Department of Homeland Security emerged as the biggest obstacle for the appropriations package, turning into a larger fight between the White House and Johnson over operations to secure the southern border and immigration policy as a whole.
The legislation unveiled Thursday would increase funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is facing a budget shortfall, to support roughly 42,000 beds in detention facilities, and it would fund 22,000 Border Patrol agents. It would also cut U.S. contributions by 20 percent to nongovernmental organizations that provide services for new arrivals to the country. Lawmakers who want to restrict immigration argue that the nonprofit groups incentivize illegal crossings.
Both parties claimed victories in the legislation. Military personnel would receive a 5.2 percent pay raise and significant increases in housing and food subsidies.
Republicans, still bruised from a lack of political success on earlier funding bills, secured a 12-month prohibition on federal funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Israel has accused some of the agency’s employees of involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks that killed some 1,200 Israelis and saw hundreds more brought back as hostages to the Gaza Strip by the terrorist group Hamas. A U.S. intelligence assessment has reportedly verified some of Israel’s claims about UNRWA.
Democrats howled at the funding ban, and said the bill would worsen the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
“UNRWA is the primary means of distributing desperately-needed assistance in Gaza — so denying funding for UNRWA is tantamount to denying food to starving people and restricting medical supplies to injured civilians,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), one of UNRWA’s leading backers in Congress, said in a statement.
The bill also includes a 6 percent cut to foreign aid programs, already a minuscule slice of federal spending, and a Republican change to the law to prohibits nonofficial U.S. flags from flying atop American embassies. GOP lawmakers hope to use that provision, a slightly narrower version of which had previously been in place, to prevent Biden-nominated officials from displaying Pride flags at official locations at U.S. diplomatic outposts.
Democrats eliminated other policy provisions to limit abortion access and restrict the rights of LGBTQ Americans.
Certain Democratic priorities also saw significant funding boosts, including $1 billion more for the early-education program Head Start and $1 billion for climate resilience funding at the Defense Department. The legislation also provides an additional 12,000 special immigrant visas for Afghans who assisted the U.S. military and are attempting to escape the Taliban government.
Lawmakers are already looking ahead to 2025 spending fights, even before the 2024 fiscal year is funded. Biden, in his State of the Union, called for major new investments in child care, elder care, affordable housing and education. But the GOP-controlled House Budget Committee passed a 2025 budget resolution earlier in the month that would limit access to social safety net programs, cut federal domestic discretionary spending and claw back much of the Biden administration’s agenda and regulations to fight climate change.
The Republican Study Committee, the House GOP’s largest caucus, representing a supermajority of Republican members, released a budget Wednesday that went further. The group suggested raising the Social Security retirement age — though it did not suggest a new age from the current 67 — eliminate certain health care subsidies in the Affordable Care Act and aggressively restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF.