House Passes HR 2219, the FY 2012 DOD Appropriations Bill

On Friday, the full House, after three days of floor amendments, passed the FY 2012 DOD appropriations bill in a decidedly bipartisan manner; 336 to 87. Over half of the Democrats in the House voted for the bill (112-75) and there were 12 Republicans voting against the bill

No further homeland security or cyber security measures were brought to the floor. The two amendments that I discussed in the previous blog on this bill were not submitted for actual consideration.

This means that, for homeland security or cyber security purposes, this bill remains essentially the same as I described in my post on the Appropriations Committee report on the bill.

Senate Inaction

This bill will move to the Senate for consideration, hopefully before the start of the 2012 fiscal year on October 1st. Typically the Senate would substitute language from their own version of the bill to start the consideration process. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not yet published even a draft sub-committee version of their bill yet.

I suspect that the main reason for the delay is the continuing discussions on the debt limit extension. Since there will apparently be some sort of spending cuts included in the final deal, it probably makes sense for the Senate to hold off. This is especially true since the cuts in their version of the bill will probably be significantly different than those found in the House passed bill.