Coming FY 2024 Spending Bill Logjams

 

I was working on a spending bill blog post this weekend and realized that the ‘Moving Forward’ portion of the post was going to be essentially the same for all of the FY 2024 spending bill blog posts that I will be writing. So, to save time, I decided to do a single post here to discuss the problem that we are likely to see with spending bills this year.

Spending Disconnect

Generally speaking, because of internal political problems, the Republican crafted spending bills in the House are going to have lower spending allocations than the same bills in the Senate. This is not terribly unusual, but this year everyone thought that the problem had been solved by the debt limit compromise which limited spending increases. The House Appropriations Committee has been setting lower spending levels than those ‘agreed to’ in the compromise.

This has Democrats upset as they do not see the current expanding deficit to be the same level of problem as do the Republicans. Again, nothing new here. Added in the mix this year is the fact that the Republican 11 still do not see the cuts being offered in the House bills to be sufficient. If/when these bills come to the floor, we will almost certainly see floor amendments to further reduce the spending in those bills. It does not currently seem, however, that there will be sufficient votes in the House to add these additional cuts to the bill. How the Republican 11 will respond if additional reductions are not approved is not clear at this point, but procedural shenanigans of some sort are to be expected.

Policy Riders

The House spending bills will include any number of conservative policy provisions that will be generally anti-abortion, anti-woke, anti-immigration, and so on while the Senate bills will have pro- riders instead. While not unusual, the House spending bills are generally more strident and less collegial in this regard than we have seen in the past. Attempts will be made on the floor in both Houses to add to the rider burden.

Senate Response

The Senate gets their chance to piddle in the works. When each House spending bill comes to the floor in that body, it will immediately have substitute language proposed which will be based upon the Senate version of the spending bill. The Senate Appropriations Committee has tended to set spending levels based upon their interpretation of the debt limit compromise. These are lower than what would normally have been expected, but still much to high for the Republican 11 in the House.

Conference

Once the Senate amends the House bills, they will go back to the House for re-consideration. While accepting the Senate amendments is technically an option, the House will inevitably insist on their version and the bills will individually go to ‘conference’. These are ad hoc committees tasked with ‘working out the differences’ between the two bills. Generally, the more extreme riders from both versions are removed and spending levels somewhere between are agreed upon.

The bills then go back to the House and Senate for votes (generally without additional amendments) and then to the President’s desk to be signed into law. This is supposed to take place twelve times (each bill for different parts of the government). And they are all supposed to be completed by the end of the current fiscal year, September 30^th, at midnight.

This year, anything that comes out of conference is going to be opposed in the House by the Republican 11 as the spending will be higher than in the original House bill and their favorite riders will almost certainly be stripped from the final version. There will be room, however, for moderate Democrats to vote for the final version of the bill, so there may be the necessary 217 votes for the spending bills to get to the President. Unless, of course, the Republican 11 get upset about their lack of control of spending, and then procedural chaos could ensue, at least long enough to last through the midnight September 30^th deadline, and then the government gets shutdown.

Continuing Resolution

It has been a long-while since we have seen twelve spending bills reach the President’s desk before the fiscal year deadline. What has become the new normal is the passage of a continuing resolution (CR) that keeps the government operating through sometime in December to allow for negotiators to hammer out acceptable compromises on the twelve spending bills all smooshed together into an Omnibus Spending bill. In addition to the 12 spending bills, all sorts of other legislative goodies get smooshed into this bill, a lot of horse trading to get people to agree to vote for the bill. The final smooshing takes place at the last minute so that no one really knows what is in the bill before it comes to a vote on the House floor.

And this process makes the Republican 11 (and to be fair, lots of other folks) furious. First the CR keeps the government running at the current funding levels and that is not reducing spending. And then the Omnibus has too many policies added to the mix that do not conform to their ideological principles of less government.

Depending on how clean (lack of additional policy riders) the CR is, there will be enough Democratic votes for the legislation that the Republican 11 will probably not have enough support to vote down the CR, but there are all sorts of procedural games that could be played to slow the consideration. Many of these games (motion to adjourn, for example) can be overcome by 11 or more Democrats voting contrary to the Republican 11. To many of those votes, and someone is going to get upset enough at Speaker McCarthy’s consorting with Democrats and a motion to vacate will ensue. McCarthy would ultimately win that vote (with costly support from moderate Democrats), but legislative chaos would reign until the end of 2024 when a new Democratically controlled House would be installed.

This is going to be an interesting spending year in the United States.