Rule for Consideration of HR 8752 – FY 2025 DHS Spending

Last night, the House Rules Committee finished their consideration of three spending bills (HR 8774, DOD spending; HR 8752, DHS spending; and HR 8771, State Department spending). They crafted a single rule (H Res 1316) for the consideration of the three bills. This is a structured rule with limited debate and a limited number of amendments that can be considered on the floor.

For HR 8752, the rule provides for potential consideration of only 61 amendments (listed in H Rept 118-559, pgs 32-6) out of the 252 amendments that had been submitted to the Rules Committee. Neither of the two amendments that I had discussed as being of potential interest here were included in the 61. Specifically, Garbarino’s CFATS spending amendment was not included in the list to be considered. So there will be no provisions in this bill that will ‘save’ the CFATS program. 

As was done last year with HR 4367 (FY 2024 DHS spending), the Rule contains the following provision:

“31. Provides that the Clerk shall not transmit to the Senate a message that the House has passed H.R. 8752 until notified by the Speaker that H.R. 2, as passed by the House on May 11, 2023, has been enacted into law.”

HR 2 is the Republican signature border security bill. Since the Democratically controlled Senate is not going to consider HR 2, this means that there will be no mechanism for the Senate to consider HR 8752. As we saw last year, the Senate, in considering one of the other spending bills can just include language from their version of the DHS spending bill (not yet crafted) as part of the substitute language for that other spending bill. And besides that, we are almost certainly going to see some sort of omnibus or minibus spending bill later this year or next instead of passing 12 spending bills, so this provision is grandstanding on the part of the House leadership.

The House will take up H Res 1316 today. While that resolution lists the three spending bills in DOD, State, and DHS order, that does not mean that that will be the order in which the bills are considered. It is even possible (it was done last year) that they could consider some of the amendments in each bill and then come back and finish up each bill later. The only thing we know about the plan at this point is that the House Leadership plans to finish up votes by 3:00 pm (EDT) on Friday.