Biden signs spending bill package hours before shutdown deadline
US President Joe Biden (Photo: Bloomberg)
President Joe Biden signed a $460 billion package of spending bills on Saturday, which was approved by the Senate in time to avoid a shutdown of many key federal agencies.
The legislation’s success means lawmakers are about halfway through finalizing their fiscal year 2024 appropriations bill.
The measure includes six annual expenditure bills and had already been adopted by the House of Representatives. In signing the bill, Biden thanked leaders and negotiators from both parties in both chambers for their work, which the White House said would mean agencies can continue normal operations.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are negotiating a second package of six bills, including defense, in an effort to have all federal agencies fully funded by the March 22 deadline.
“For people who worry that divided government means nothing ever gets done, this bipartisan package says otherwise,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said after lawmakers passed the measure Friday evening, just hours before a deadline.
He said passage of the bill would allow for the hiring of more air traffic controllers and railroad safety inspectors, give federal firefighters a pay raise and increase support for homeless veterans, among other things.
The Senate approved the bill by a vote of 75 to 22. Lawmakers sought votes on several amendments and wanted to have their say on the bill and other priorities during the on-site debate. It was unclear whether senators would be able to avoid a brief shutdown, although eventual passage was never really in doubt.
“I would urge my colleagues to stop playing with fire here,” said Senator Susan Collins, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It would be irresponsible of us not to pass these bills and do the fundamental job of funding government. What’s more important?
The votes came more than five months into the current budget year, after congressional leaders relied on a series of stopgap bills to keep federal agencies funded for weeks or months at a time as they struggled to agree on spending for the whole year.
Ultimately, total discretionary spending enacted by Congress is expected to amount to about $1.66 trillion for the full fiscal year ending September 30.
Republicans were able to keep non-defense spending relatively stable compared to the previous year. Advocates say this is progress in an era when annual federal deficits exceeding $1 trillion have become the norm. But many Republican lawmakers were looking for much sharper cuts and more policy victories.
The House Freedom Caucus, which includes dozens of the GOP’s most conservative members, urged Republicans to vote against the first spending package because the second is still being negotiated.
Democrats blocked most policymakers that Republicans wanted to include in the package. For example, they beat back an attempt to block new rules expanding access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
They were also able to fully fund a nutrition program for low-income women, infants, and children, raising about $7 billion for what is known as the WIC program. That’s an increase of $1 billion from the previous year.
However, Republicans were able to score some policy victories. One provision will prevent the sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China. Another policy mandate prohibits the Justice Department from investigating parents who exercise free speech rights at local school board meetings.
Another provision strengthens gun rights for certain veterans, although opponents of the measure said it could make it easier for people with very serious mental illnesses such as dementia to obtain a firearm.
This is not the package I would have written on my own,” said Sen. Patty Murray, the Democratic chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. But I’m proud that we have protected the absolutely essential funding that the American people rely on in their daily activities. lives.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said one problem he sees with the bill is that there was too much compromise, and that led to too much spending.
A lot of people don’t understand this,” he said. They think there is no cooperation in Washington and the opposite is true. There is a compromise every day on every spending bill.”
It’s a compromise between big-government Democrats and big-government Republicans, he added.
Still, with a divided Congress and a Democratic-led White House, any bill that doesn’t get support from members of both political parties has no chance of passing.
The bill also includes more than 6,600 projects requested by individual lawmakers, with a price tag of about $12.7 billion. The projects drew criticism from some Republican members, although members of both parties broadly participated in requesting them on behalf of their states and congressional districts.
Paul called the spending “the kind of kickback that rakes in billions and trillions of other dollars because you get people to buy into the total package by giving them a little bit of pork for their city, a little bit of pork for their donors.”
But an effort by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., to take out the projects drew only 32 votes, with 64 against. Murray said Scott’s efforts would “undo all the hard work and input we asked from everyone on projects that would help their constituents.”
Even though lawmakers find themselves passing spending bills five months into the budget year, Republicans view the process as improved because they have broken the cycle of passing all the spending bills in one big package that lawmakers have little time to study before passing are asked to vote. or risk government shutdown. Still, others said splitting the funding into two pieces of legislative war would hardly be a breakthrough.
The first package includes the Departments of Justice, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Interior and Transportation.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: March 9, 2024 | 11:34 PM IST