Congress is getting tired of passing short-term spending bills, but has no choice but to hold its nose and pass another one Friday to give lawmakers more time to reach a deal on spending through the rest of the fiscal year.
The bill the House and Senate plan to vote on Friday will give Congress just one more week to reach that deal, which lawmakers are hoping and praying is enough time to tie up loose ends on the longer agreement.
The week-long spending bill will replace another short-term spending bill that expires on April 28. And the thought of another placeholder bill earned a weary sigh from lawmakers in both parties who have just about had enough.
“Please tell me we are close,” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said to the House Appropriation chairman and ranking Democrat during a Thursday meeting to set the rules for debating the week-long bill.
Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., told the House Rules Committee he is “optimistic,” an agreement is at hand. “But we need a little more time to process this legislation and prepare it for the House floor,” Frelinghuysen said.
Lawmakers in both parties say they are fed up with extensions, which are called continuing resolutions. The measures typically freeze funding at previous fiscal year levels, which has hampered government agencies and in particular the military.
Some lawmakers are so fed up with continuing resolutions they are threatening to vote against any CR longer than a week.
“I will not support an extended CR,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz.. “I will not vote for it. And I don’t think a number of my colleagues will, either.”
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., called the stopgap funding habit practiced by Congress “professional malpractice.”
Congressional appropriators are frustrated that lawmakers did not pass a complete spending bill late in 2016 that would have provided government funding until the fiscal year’s end, which is Sept. 30. Republicans agreed to pass a bill that supplied funding only until April 28 in order to ensure the newly elected Trump administration would have a say in some fiscal 2017 spending.
But the Trump administration has been largely rebuffed in its attempt to have a significant say on the spending bill, thanks to leverage held by Democrats in the Senate who are needed to pass it, and Republicans who don’t like Trump’s ideas.
Lawmakers have rejected his request for border wall funding, for instance, as well as his desire to include a provision that would withhold federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities.
Democrats also forced Trump this week to commit to funding Obamacare subsidies that Republicans oppose, telling the GOP and Trump they would oppose a spending bill that did not codify the money.
Instead of a putting his stamp on federal spending, Trump has been faced this month with the spectacle of a possible government shutdown occurring within his first 100 days in office as the two parties wrangle over the details of a bill that could have been signed into law before he was sworn into office.
“We put President Trump in a difficult spot,” said Cole. “I’m not sure his team realized how difficult a spot. But frankly, the leadership in this party should have known.”
More ominous for Trump and the GOP is that the mid-year wrangling over 2017 spending has pushed off work on the twelve fiscal 2018 spending bills, increasing the chances the dozen measures won’t be completed by the end of the fiscal year. The result will be yet another end-of-year showdown over a massive government funding measure that the GOP has come to dread.
Public polling shows Republicans are often blamed for the spending mess.
“The fact that we are late, that we are so far into 2017, there is a certain inevitability that things will be truncated,” Frelinghuysen acknowledged Thursday. “A tough road ahead. But I’m an optimist.”
