The Benefits of Omnibus Spending Bills

While House Republicans are making a major effort to avoid having an Omnibus Spending bill for FY 2024, it is perhaps a good idea to look at why those spending bills have become so important over the last decade or so. The problem is not so much in the House (at least until this year when an unruly majority has problems passing spending bills), but rather an unruly Senate has allowed a small handful of Senators to make the ‘Advise and Consent’ process for approving an increasing number of Presidential nominees a more time-consuming process. This means that the Senate has less time to take up necessary and important legislation.

In more recent years, this process has been further stalled by a few Senators demanding votes on unpopular amendments during the consideration of significant legislation. All in all, the number of pieces of legislation that the Senate is able to pass has been greatly diminished. Unfortunately, the number of bills that fall into the ‘must pass’ category has only increased as the federal government continues to expand.

The year-end omnibus spending bill has become the legislative safety valve. For example, the FY 2023 Consolidated Spending Act included 27 additional Divisions beyond the 12 actual spending bills. While many of the legislative bits added to those divisions were political horse-trading efforts to ensure wider support for the bill, these Divisions included FAA reauthorization, agriculture reauthorization as well as a number of lesser program reauthorizations. Without an omnibus spending bills, most of these bills never would have made it through the increasingly convoluted legislative process.

While some Republicans in the House are focused on avoiding these large end-of-year spending bills, it is not clear that their efforts will actually work. The Congress has yet to complete the conference committee process on a single piece of legislation (the NDAA for instance). And the House has not yet tried to take up the one spending bill that the Senate completed work on. I suspect that the Republican fringe is trying to stop that consideration because of the possibility that the Senate version of the bill could be passed by Democrats and a relatively small number of Republican moderates voting for approval. Without a House vote to insist on their language, HR 4366 cannot technically start the conference process.

Lacking that vote, the Congress will have to rely upon the backroom process under which Omnibus spending bills have been formulated in the past. We may still see the spending bills stuffed with authorization and miscellaneous legislation.