Speaker Johnson announces bipartisan deal on short-term spending bill

Congressional leaders announced a bipartisan agreement Sunday on a short-term spending bill that is expected to be approved and sent to the White House this week to head off a possible partial government shutdown when the new budget year begins Oct. 1.

The House is set to vote early this week on a three-month continuing resolution that will fund the government at the current fiscal year’s spending levels until Dec. 20. The bill does not include the controversial Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act that doomed its predecessor, and trims some extra spending that the previous version included, too.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, wrote in a letter to Republicans that he was pushing the latest effort to prevent the Senate from jamming the House with a stopgap that could be “loaded with billions in new spending and unrelated provisions.”

“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” he wrote. “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”

The “bare-bones” continuing resolution does include a $231 million boost to the Secret Service, following calls from lawmakers to provide more resources to the police force after a second foiled assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

However, the money will not be disbursed until the Department of Homeland Security provides the assassination task force investigating the attempts on Mr. Trump’s life with the Mission Assurance Report.

The funding also comes with the stipulation that the DHS provide any materials requested by the panel for its investigation and that acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe respond to oversight inquiries in a “timely manner.”

The stopgap also kept the millions for the presidential transition and inauguration, and security that comes with that process, but stripped nearly $2 billion for Virginia class submarine construction.

It comes after the speaker’s play to pass a six-month stopgap with the SAVE Act was torpedoed by Republicans and Democrats. Mr. Johnson is set to again face resistance from the House GOP, and will likely have to rely on Democrats to pass the legislation.

Republicans opposed the speaker’s last effort for several reasons. Some saw it as a meaningless messaging ploy that would never result in policy changes, others felt it lacked sufficient cuts in spending, while others voted no because they were opposed to continuing resolutions.

Rep. Tim Burchett, Tennessee Republican, voted against the last stopgap and plans to vote against the latest. While some Republicans may turn their back on this newest continuing resolution, Mr. Burchett expected that it wouldn’t be enough to kill the bill.

“I think, in facing a government shutdown, I think they’ll buckle,” Mr. Burchett told The Washington Times. “I think it’ll probably pass.”

Whether the lawmakers will strike a deal on a year-end, colossal omnibus or again extend the current fiscal year’s spending levels is unclear.

Typically Congress resorts to a catch-all end-of-year spending bill right before Christmas to close out the spending fight of a given year, but Mr. Johnson threw a wrench in that cycle with his approach last year, which saw the speaker using multiple stopgap bills to incrementally pass smaller, bundled spending packages.

A House leadership staff member familiar with the ongoing spending negotiations said that Republicans and Democrats are still hashing out an overall spending level for fiscal year 2025, despite agreeing to a spending cap when passing the debt ceiling deal in 2023.

“So that’s the same dynamic that just got delayed an extra couple of months,” the staff member said. “But so we’ll have to see how that plays out.”