Possible Funding Proposal Likely To Divide Congress

When Congress gets back to work this month, the top priority will be agreeing on legislation to keep the federal government funded into the fiscal year 2025, which begins October 1. Members on both sides of the aisle agree a stopgap measure, a continuing resolution (CR), will be needed. The question, as always, will be in the details.

Continuing resolutions have become, in recent decades, an extremely common part of the federal government's annual appropriations process. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the last time Congress did not need to pass a CR to avert a government shutdown was in fiscal year 1999. They needed four CRs this fiscal year

It wasn't until late March that Congress approved the full-year funding bills for FY 2024 -- the fiscal year was already nearly half over. Now, four weeks until the start of FY '25, the time has again run out to complete a regular appropriations process and House Republican leadership appears poised to try to use that to its advantage.

Punchbowl News is reporting that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), at the urging of his conference's far-right Freedom Caucus, will try to push through a continuing resolution that funds that government into early next year, when the next president (Republicans clearly are hopeful that it will be Donald Trump) can weigh in on a longer-term spending plan. They also report that the CR would contain none of the extra funding contained in the side deals funding that former Speaker McCarthy negotiated in 2023 with President Biden.

That alone would be enough to get Democrats to vote against the bill, but it's also being reported Johnson is likely to attach the GOP's controversial Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to the CR. The bill, which aims to prevent non-citizens from voting in federal elections, passed on a largely partisan vote in the House earlier in the summer but has not been taken up in the Senate.

Democratic leadership and the White House oppose the bill, noting that it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. A continuing resolution with the SAVE Act attached to it would be certain to fail in the Senate and might not even have the support to pass in the House.

Johnson hasn't confirmed this plan, but Democrats are already planning it. Their top appropriator, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said, in a statement, "...like last year, House Republicans have taken the process of funding the government down a partisan path — forcing us to consider extreme, harmful funding bills that have no chance of becoming law."

In an interview in July, Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla. 4) said his preference was not to attach anything partisan to the CR and to have it extend funding only until December, so the current Congress can finish the job it started.

"We know we’re going to have a new president, no matter who wins the election," Cole said, "they shouldn’t show up and have to worry about a government shutdown immediately — we ought to fund the government through September 30, and give the new president a chance to get his or her people in place."

Rep. Cole was unavailable for comment on Tuesday.