WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders announced Sunday they had reached a deal on a short-term spending bill that would fund federal agencies for about three months, averting a partial government shutdown when the new budget year begins Oct. 1. Final decisions will be delayed until after the November elections.
Interim budget bills typically fund agencies at current levels, but an additional $231 million was included to bolster the Secret Service after the two assassination attempts on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Additional money was also added to ease the presidential transition, among other things.
Legislators have wrestled to get to this point as the current budget year draws to a close at the end of the month. At the urging of the most conservative members of his conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had tied temporary funding to a mandate that would have forced states to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote.
But Johnson abandoned that approach to reach a deal, even as Trump continued to insist that there should be no emergency measure without mandatory voting.
Shortly thereafter, bipartisan negotiations began in earnest, with leadership agreeing to extend funding through mid-December. That gives the current Congress the ability to craft a full-year budget bill after the Nov. 5 elections, rather than passing that responsibility to the next Congress and the president.
In a letter to his Republican colleagues, Johnson said the budget measure would be “very limited and austere” and would include “only those extensions that are absolutely necessary.”
“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the current circumstances,” Johnson wrote. “As history has taught us and current polls confirm, shutting down the government less than 40 days before a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would review the bill in its entirety before this week’s vote, but with the agreement, “Congress is now on a bipartisan path to avoid a government shutdown that would harm everyday Americans.”
Rep. Tom Cole, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said Friday that the talks were going well.
“There’s nothing that’s happened so far that we can’t deal with,” said Cole, R-Okla. “Most people don’t want a government shutdown and they don’t want it to interfere with the election. So nobody’s saying, ‘I’ve got to have this or we’re going to run.’ It’s just not like that.”
Johnson’s earlier effort failed in the Democratic-controlled Senate and was rejected by the White House. But it did give the chairman a chance to show Trump and the conservatives in his conference that he was fighting for their request.
The end result — government funding effectively on autopilot — was what many had predicted. With the election just weeks away, few lawmakers in either party were up for the brinkmanship that often leads to a shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the same deal could have been reached two weeks ago, but “Chairman Johnson chose to follow the MAGA method and wasted valuable time.”
“As I’ve said throughout this process, there’s only one way to get things done: with bipartisan support and both cameras,” Schumer said.
Now, a bipartisan majority is expected to push the short-term measure across the finish line this week. The agreement on the short-term measure does not mean that reaching a final budget in December will be easy. The election results could also affect the political calculations if one party fares much better than the other, potentially pushing the fight into early next year.
There are also strings attached to the Secret Service funding. Lawmakers have made the funding contingent on the Department of Homeland Security providing certain information to a House task force and a Senate committee investigating the Trump assassination attempts.
In a recent letter, the Secret Service told lawmakers that a lack of funding was not the reason for Trump’s security lapses when a gunman… climbed onto an unsecured roof on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and opened fire. But Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. said this week that the agency had “immediate needs” and that he was talking to Congress.