House, Senate preparing short-term government funding bill for likely vote next week

Lawmakers are getting closer to producing another short-term funding patch to avert a partial government shutdown, with just one working week left until the funding deadline of Oct. 1.

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, Oklahoma Republican, told The Washington Times Friday that Republicans and Democrats were putting together a three-month stopgap bill that could run up to mid-December.

“I couldn’t be more pleased with the tenor of all sides,” Mr. Cole said. “They want to keep the government open and let the American people make their decisions in November and then come back and we’ll see where we’re at.”

Mr. Cole would not go into detail about whether the plan pushes for more funding for the Secret Service, disaster relief or the Veterans Administration would be included in the bill, but noted that the negotiators “did not want to jeopardize its passage in any way.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House spending panel, told reporters that discussions on whether to boost funding for the Secret Service following a second apparent assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump come down to whether more resources or more flexibility for the agency would be needed.

“Because it’s nice to say that there shouldn’t be any violence, but there is. So what we need to do is to prepare for that,” Ms. DeLauro said. “So it may be a combination of resources and flexibility, but that’s again being discussed.”

The bill would likely be relatively clean, with no policy add-ons, and will keep funding levels agreed upon during fiscal year 2024 in place until the end of the year.

The emerging fallback plan comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, failed to pass his six-month continuing resolution paired with legislation that would have required proof of citizenship to vote.

While Mr. Johnson has been coy on what his next moves will be, members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees have been working to produce a new plan ahead of the deadline to fund the government.

Rep. Mike Simpson, the chair of the Interior spending subcommittee, expects the new legislation would likely keep much of the extra funding language, such as $10 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, $1.95 billion for contracts to continue the Virginia Class Submarine program, and millions for the impending presidential inauguration and related security costs, from the original stopgap proposal.

Not all Republicans like this approach. However, most Democrats in the House and the Senate will likely support the latest endeavor because it will be a shorter funding patch and not include the controversial Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

Rep. Chip Roy, who was the sponsor of the SAVE Act, said that he would not support the pending clean stopgap because it would likely not include any cuts to spending, and lacked his bill.

But that plan was predestined to fail before it was voted on because a slew of Republicans felt that including the SAVE Act was a political messaging ploy, and disliked the lack of spending cuts or boosts to military spending.

He said Republicans who will now vote against this latest stopgap play who also voted against his preferred legislation were in a principled fight, but that he disagreed with their position.

“My position is this was imminently predictable, this was going to be the logical outcome,” said Mr. Roy, Texas Republican. “So it’s hard to complain about the thing that you helped create the environment that resulted in the thing.”