Four months after President Trump warned he would “never again” sign a massive federal spending bill containing areas he wants to cut, Congress has finally made some progress reforming its long-broken process of appropriating annual government funding and trying to get it done on time.
But it could mean Trump will have to wait for Congress to allocate the kind of money he is seeking to fund a southern border wall.
“The president is willing to be patient,” Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said about the wall funding, after a White House meeting last week with Trump on the GOP spending plan.
Republicans and Democrats are both eager to avoid spending showdowns and the specter of cable news “shutdown” clocks ahead of the November midterm elections. It’s pushed the two sides to work together to at least advance half of the dozen spending measures that fund the government and must pass by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
The Senate, which unlike the House plans to remain in session throughout most of August, is expected to make additional progress on the spending front this summer.
Lawmakers are poised to take up legislation that combines the Defense Department appropriations bill with funding for the Labor and Education Departments. The move would put Congress on a path to passing the vast majority of 2019 federal spending through regular order and outside of the dreaded “omnibus” spending measure that lumps in nearly all the federal budgets in a last-minute, barely scrutinized deal.
The House has passed half of the fiscal 2019 spending measures and three of those measures, grouped into one bill, are now under negotiations with the Senate.
“Unlike a handful of years in the past, we think we have a very good chance of getting a lot of these appropriations bills done and into law before the fiscal year deadline,” Ryan said.
The Senate has also made significant strides to avoid last year’s spending stalemate, when no appropriations measures made it through the upper chamber through the regular order process.
This year, the chamber has already passed a trio of spending bills grouped into a “minibus” and is on track to pass four measures tied together in another measure next week.
After that, they’ll attempt to move the Defense-Labor-Education measure, Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said.
Shelby, who took over the spending panel this year, has been eager to dodge having to take up a last minute, massive spending deal like the $1.3 trillion omnibus that Trump signed in March with a “never again” warning attached.
Shelby had initially hoped to pass all 12 government spending bills separately but acknowledges that won’t happen this year due partly to time constraints. The spending process kicked off late thanks to the delayed passage of the 2018 omnibus.
But Congress is on track to avoid yet another dreaded omnibus.
“I don’t think we want a big omnibus bill, we want to break the pieces apart, as much as we can,” Shelby told the Washington Examiner. “We’re not there yet, but it would be a big improvement.”
If lawmakers end up fighting over spending, much of it will likely center around wall funding.
Neither Ryan nor Senate leaders would disclose how much wall funding Trump is willing to accept.
The House has appropriated $5 billion, while the Senate included only $1.6 billion, which was Trump’s original request.
Trump is hoping to include more funding but nobody is sure how much could ultimately be added.
Wall funding is part of the Homeland Security appropriations legislation and neither the House nor Senate has scheduled a vote on those measures.
Ryan last week acknowledged not all of government spending would be completed on time. He said some legislation would have to be carried over temporarily in a continuing resolution. Homeland Security and the wall funding will likely be candidates for a CR.
“Even if we don’t get all of it done, the fact that we get 90 percent of discretionary spending done is a big deal,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, told the Washington Examiner. “We are trying. One minibus at a time.”
