Glass Half Full: Following a jam-packed July, August recess will arrive a week early for the House this year with votes on three major appropriations bills cancelled for next week. The decision to punt next week's votes on Labor-H, CJS, and T-HUD comes after several bills – Energy and Water, Ag-FDA, and Financial Services – were pulled from the House floor due to late GOP defections. It remains to be seen whether the House will turn to the remaining bills when they return in September or whether all eyes will be on a continuing resolution (CR).
Despite the hiccups with these three bills, the House continued its forward momentum this week with the passage of the Interior bill by a vote of 210 – 205. House appropriators have now managed to pass five of the twelve bills before the August recess. In addition to Interior, these include MilCon-VA, Defense, Homeland Security, and State-Foreign Ops. This marks a higher rate of success for House appropriators than in recent years.
Markup Momentum: Following last week's successful markup of Legislative Branch, MilCon-VA, and Ag-FDA, Senate appropriators are moving at an impressive clip with four additional bills under their belts this week: CJS, Interior-Environment, State-Foreign Ops, and T-HUD. All four bills passed out of the full committee on Thursday with strong bipartisan votes.
The Senate also plans to make up for lost time while the House is out for recess, with another full committee markup scheduled for next Thursday on the remaining five bills. If all bills are reported favorably, this will put them in a conferenceable position heading into August.
Ultimately, the biggest hurdle in the Senate will be ensuring the bills are swiftly brought up for floor consideration. While we do not expect the committee-passed bills to make it to the floor in the near future, we are optimistic about the Senate's progress in the past month.
CR-later!: While the House and Senate are both moving in the right direction, a CR to avert a September 30 shutdown is inevitable. We expect the CR will fund the government until after the election and may include disaster relief funding for fires, midwestern tornadoes, and the Baltimore bridge collapse. We believe both chambers are capable of finding a compromise on these bills before the end of the year (and the end of this Congress), thus avoiding a CR into 2025. A major motivator will be the looming one percent cuts from FY23 levels if a CR is in effect on January 1.
Sudden Shortfall: The Department of Veteran Affairs notified appropriators last week that they are facing a combined $15 billion budget shortfall for FY24 and FY25, which could render the Department unable to provide some benefits expected to be paid-out to veterans on October 1. The news is creating headaches for appropriators, who have already passed the MilCon-VA bill in the House and advanced the bill out of committee in the Senate. Republicans have said had they known about this shortfall sooner, it could have been factored into the $34.5 billion emergency spending package negotiated between Chair Murray and Vice Chair Collins. Senate Veteran Affairs Committee Chair Jon Tester has suggested using unobligated funds from the previous fiscal year to provide a temporary fix, but it's still unclear how much money the Department has remaining in unobligated funds
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