As the concerns of a shutdown continue to loom, the US House of Representatives approved a package of six spending bills on Wednesday (local time) sending the legislation to the Senate days ahead of the deadline, The Hill reported. The \u201cminibus\u201d \u2014 which funds a slew of programs and agencies through the end of fiscal 2024 \u2014 cleared the House in 339-85 vote, with 207 Democrats and 132 Republicans throwing their support behind the measure. The 1,050-page package calls for more than USD 450 billion in funding for the departments of Veterans Affairs, agriculture, interior, transportation, housing and urban development, justice, commerce and energy.<\/p>\n
The legislation now heads to the Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the chamber will hold a vote this week so Congress can fund the relevant departments \u201cwith time to spare before Friday\u2019s deadline.\u201d The successful vote means the House is halfway done with the appropriations process for fiscal 2024, an undertaking that has fractured the GOP conference, thrown Speaker Mike Johnson into hot water with his right flank, and required four short-term extensions to arrive at the current juncture. The tougher spending fight, however, lies ahead.<\/p>\n
The remaining six government funding bills \u2014 which fund tougher areas such as the Departments of Defence, Homeland Security and Health and human services \u2014 are due on March 22, and top appropriators say those measures will be more difficult to get over the finish line, according to The Hill. \u201cThe next tranche is more challenging than the first tranche \u2014 not that either one of them are easy,\u201d Representative Steve Womack, who chairs the subcommittee that crafts IRS funding said on Tuesday. \u201cBut there\u2019s quite a bit at stake. Obviously, we\u2019ve got national security that\u2019s involved in this next group.\u201d<\/p>\n
It marks a win for Johnson, who has sought to break what he dubbed the \u201comnibus fever\u201d in Washington and move away from the sprawling, typically end-of-year spending measures that lump together all 12 appropriations bills. House passage of the package also puts Congress one step closer to averting a partial shutdown, which the Speaker has pushed to avoid. \u201cIn a way, we\u2019re sort of victimized by the tradition that\u2019s been developed in Congress and we\u2019re working really hard to bend that backwards, right? And so you can\u2019t turn an aircraft carrier overnight. So what we did was we broke the omnibus fever, we put it into the laddered CR approach,\u201d Johnson said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Johnson and GOP leadership claimed some key wins in the package approved Wednesday, including cuts to non-defense funds and funding for efforts to fight fentanyl. They also include cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, among other agencies, in addition to provisions that prevent the sale of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China and prohibit the Justice Department from targeting or investigating parents who exercise their right to free speech at local school board meetings.<\/p>\n
Negotiators on both sides have discussed the difficulty in divvying up dollars for programs within the tight constraints imposed as part of a previous spending caps deal brokered by President Biden and McCarthy last year, as reported by The Hill. Some Democrats have also voiced frustration with a concession on a GOP-backed guns-related provision aimed at allowing veterans determined unable to manage their benefits to be able to purchase guns.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the Republicans say the proposal is important to keep veterans who need help managing their money from losing their gun rights. But Democrats have sounded alarms about the impact the measure could have on veterans\u2019 suicide rates, as well as the potential for those deemed \u201cmentally incompetent\u201d to have firearms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the concerns of a shutdown continue to loom, the US House of Representatives approved a package of six spending\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":33348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4050,10911,10843,8068,158,10910,10912,4627,10914,1603,10913,8112,904,1323,10909,10907,2600,793,3303,10905,10908,776,672,10906],"class_list":["post-33343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-agriculture","tag-averting-government-shutdown","tag-bipartisan-bill","tag-budget-cuts","tag-china","tag-commerce","tag-departments-of-defence","tag-energy","tag-free-speech","tag-funds","tag-gun-rights","tag-health-and-human-services","tag-homeland-security","tag-house-of-representatives","tag-housing-and-urban-development","tag-interior","tag-justice","tag-justice-department","tag-senate-majority-leader-chuck-schumer","tag-six-spending-bills","tag-transportation","tag-us","tag-us-congress","tag-veterans-affairs"],"reading_time":"4 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}