Crunch time: Biden hosts congressional leaders to press for Ukraine aid, avoid federal shutdown

President Biden is sitting down Tuesday with congressional leaders at the White House in a scramble to unlock aid to Israel and Ukraine and avert a partial government shutdown at the end of the week.

Mr. Biden will press House Speaker Mike Johnson to pass the $95 billion national security package, which allocates roughly $60 billion to Ukraine’s war against Russian invaders. The package received bipartisan support when it cleared the Senate, but Mr. Johnson has resisted putting the bill to a vote amid pressure from former President Donald Trump and growing opposition from House Republicans.

Also at the meeting are Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. All three are on the same page with Mr. Biden on Ukraine war aid.

The group will also try to hammer out a spending agreement to keep the government funded for the rest of the fiscal year. If they are unable to forge a path on funding, the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development will run out of money at midnight Friday.

Thanks to the spending deal brokered by Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, they have until March 9 to fund the rest of the government, including the Defense, State, Homeland, Security and Justice departments.

There has been no sign of progress for months in advancing the individual spending bills but Mr. Johsnon still holds out hope he can get them to the floor for a vote this week.

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However, Mr. Johnson told lawmakers on a members-only call over the weekend that another stopgap bill might be needed to keep from going over the fiscal cliff.

House Freedom Caucus members want the speaker to include policy riders in the spending bills, such as ending the Pentagon’s abortion travel reimbursement policy and a slew of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, that the Democrat-led Senate could consider poison pills.

Mr. Johnson said on the call that the bills weren’t “home runs” but did include some conservative policy priorities.

The arch-conservatives told the speaker in a letter last week that if they do not get their policy wishes, they will support a yearlong stopgap bill that will trigger an automatic across-the-board 1% cut in spending — a caveat most lawmakers believe will hamstring defense spending.

Mr. Johnson likely will have to rely on Democratic votes to advance spending bills or a stopgap measure, which could cost him his job.

Still, a partial shutdown starting this weekend would result in furloughs for hundreds of thousands of federal workers and freeze pay for those working in the affected departments, including those who would have to report for work. It would also temporarily endanger food aid programs for women and children and halt loans to American farmers.

Mr. Biden would likely benefit politically as he could pin the blame on Republicans.

Mr. Johnson, who rejected both a bipartisan border deal and a stand-alone foreign bill out of the Senate, had requested a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Biden, but he was repeatedly denied.

The White House griped that Mr. Johnson shifted his views on moving forward with the measures and Mr. Biden said he’d be willing to meet with the house speaker if he had “anything to say.”

The last time Mr. Biden met with the “Big Four” was in mid-January at the White House to discuss how to break a stalemate over border policy and foreign aid.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the president will try to push forward his request to provide aid to Ukraine as well as Israel and Taiwan.

“What the president wants to see is we want to make sure that the national security interests of the American people get put first, right?” she said. “That it is not used as a political football, right? We want to make sure that gets done.”