Congressional Leaders Strike Deal to Fund Government Into Early March

WASHINGTON—Congressional leaders have reached an agreement on a new stopgap spending bill that would extend government funding into March, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) sticks to his plan to defy the most brass-knuckled budget hawks in his party in a bid to avoid a government shutdown.

The government has been running on short-term spending laws, known as continuing resolutions, or CRs, since the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, as lawmakers continued to negotiate full-year funding.

Under the new agreement, parts of the government including the Transportation Department, the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration would be funded through March 1, while the rest of the government would be funded through March 8. Currently, those two sets of funds are due to expire on Jan. 19 and Feb. 2, respectively.

Congressional leaders want to extend the deadline for hammering out full-year fiscal 2024 spending bills, at the previously agreed-to levels of $1.66 trillion. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said Sunday that he has scheduled a procedural vote for Tuesday.

“To avoid a shutdown, it will take bipartisan cooperation in the Senate and the House to quickly pass the CR and send it to the President’s desk before Friday’s funding deadline,” Schumer said in a written statement.

In reaching the agreement, Johnson risks triggering a backlash from House Republicans who are itching for another fight, even after last year’s bruising ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.). Those Republicans want to use the spending agreement either to slash funding levels or extract policy concessions, such as stricter border-security measures.

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and their ideological allies have loudly opposed another stopgap spending bill, while congressional leaders widely agreed that one was needed. The caucus and its allies had argued that an interim bill was a stall tactic that risked resulting in bloated budgets that were unreasonable at the same time the government is borrowing more than it spends.

Johnson, 80 days into his tenure as House speaker, sided with the military hawks and appropriators in his GOP conference, after convening closed-door meetings in which the two factions pressed him to take their side. The military hawks had argued in favor of another short-term bill, in part because that path was likely to avoid $36 billion in cuts to defense spending that could be triggered by an alternative legislative course favored by many of the House Freedom Caucus members.

That alternative course, called a full-year continuing resolution, would trigger a provision of last year’s debt-ceiling deal that would impose across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending. Military spending for all of fiscal 2024 would total $850 billion, well below the $886 billion specified by the top-line agreement that Johnson and Schumer reached earlier this week.

It would also mandate deep cuts in nonmilitary spending, which Democrats oppose.

Some Republicans have begun shifting their fight for tougher border-security provisions to the government-spending bill, concluding that the threat of shutting down the government because of the expiration of current funding would give them the greatest leverage in their quest to stanch the flow of migrants at the border.

Write to Siobhan Hughes at [email protected]