On Wednesday, congressional leaders of both parties reached a new deal on a federal funding bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022. With this bill, Congress plans to spend $1.5 trillion to fund our federal agencies, including our military.
The House is expected to vote on the bill this Thursday, and the Senate will need to vote on it before its Friday night deadline… or else face a government shutdown this weekend during a rapidly escalating war in Europe.
Congressional leaders are expecting to avert a weekend shutdown. On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters about Congress’s desire “to act in bipartisan fashions and have our government operating in full capacity… particularly at a time of crisis and confrontation.”
“War in Europe has focused the energies of Congress to getting something done and getting it done fast,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., added, “It needs to be passed. It needs to be passed quickly.”
However, the Senate has only a couple days to debate the bill before voting on it. A single recalcitrant senator could delay the vote, and President Joe Biden is expected to remain outside Washington for much of the week while speaking at a conference in Philadelphia.
For this reason, some Senate Republicans have become frustrated by the lack of time for turnaround. Sound familiar?
“It’s just dysfunctional to have something as large as this and then expect people to vote on it without having the opportunity to review it,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., told CNN Tuesday.
Sound familiar?
Though a tiny fraction of the massive bill, the money countering a Russian blitzkrieg that’s devastated parts of Ukraine and prompted Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II ensured the measure would pass with robust bipartisan support. President Joe Biden requested $10 billion for military, humanitarian and economic aid last week, and Democratic and Republican backing was so staunch that the figure grew to $12 billion Monday and $13.6 billion just a day later.
McConnell said the measure would provide loan guarantees to Poland to help it replace aircraft it is sending Ukraine. “It’s been like pulling teeth” to get Democrats to agree to some of the defense spending, he said. But he added, “It’s an important step.
Over $4 billion of the Ukraine aid was to help the country and Eastern European nations cope with the 2 million refugees who’ve already fled the fighting. Another $6.7 billion was for the deployment of U.S. troops and equipment to the region and to transfer American military items to Ukraine and U.S. allies, and there was economic aid and money to enforce economic sanctions against Russia as well.
This new bill goes on for 2,741 pages. It allocates money to Cabinet agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It also includes a division for “COVID Supplemental Appropriations,” like money for a testing regimen.
According to CNN, congressmembers have been calling it the “omnibus” bill — a bill for all.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans want to pass the foreign aid by Friday. “We’re going to support them against tyranny, oppression, violent acts of subjugation,” Biden said at the White House.
However, some congressional Republicans have taken issue with other parts of the bill. They credit Congress with already allocating enough funding for pandemic response.
Some Republican have called to separate the Ukraine provisions from the rest of the bill, despite worries of a wartime shutdown.
“We request that you ensure that we take these matters up separately and that we have a full and robust debate on the amount of aid required in Ukraine,” Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus wrote in a letter to Republican leadership Tuesday.
In the end, the bill will likely pass the House on Wednesday, averting a government shutdown and stymying Russia’s aggression.
It will also include victories for both parties.
For Democrats, it provides $730 billion for domestic programs, 6.7% more than last year, the biggest boost in four years. Republicans won $782 billion for defense, 5.6% over last year’s levels.
In contrast, Biden’s 2022 budget last spring proposed a 16% increase for domestic programs and less than 2% more for defense — numbers that were doomed from the start thanks to Democrats’ slender congressional majorities.
The bill was also fueled by large numbers of hometown projects for both parties’ lawmakers, which Congress had banned since 2011 but were revived this year. The spending — once called earmarks, now dubbed community projects — includes money for courthouses in Connecticut and Tennessee and repairs to a post office in West Virginia. And it names a federal building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, after Sen. Richard Shelby, the state’s senior GOP senator, a chief author of the bill who’s retiring after six terms.
For pandemic response, Democrats won $15.6 billion for a fresh round of spending for vaccines, testing and treatments. That money including $5 billion for fighting the pandemic around the world. That was below Biden’s $22.5 billion request.
Republicans said they’d forced Democrats to pay for the entire amount by pulling back money from COVID-19 relief bills enacted previously. Much of the money was to go to help states and businesses cope with the toll of the pandemic.
There’s added money for child care, job training, economic development in poorer communities and more generous Pell grants for low-income undergraduates. Public health and biomedical research would get increases, including $194 million for Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” effort to cure the disease.
Citizenship and Immigration Services would get funds to reduce huge backlogs of people trying to enter the U.S. There would be fresh efforts to bolster renewable energy and curb pollution, with some of that aimed specifically at communities of color.
There is added funding to build affordable housing. And the measure distributes billions of dollars initially provided by the bipartisan infrastructure bill enacted last year for road, rail and airport projects.
The bill “delivers transformative federal investments to help lower the cost of living for working families, create American jobs, and provide a lifeline for the vulnerable,” said House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.
The bill renews programs protecting women against domestic violence and requires many infrastructure operators to report significant cyber attacks and ransomware demands to federal authorities. The Defense Department would have to report on extremist ideologies within the ranks.
The measure retains strict decades-old curbs against using federal money for nearly all abortions. It has $300 million in military assistance for Ukraine and $300 million to help nearby countries like the Baltic nations and Poland. Service members would get 2.7% pay raises, and Navy shipbuilding would get a boost in a counter to China.
It “rejects liberal policies and effectively addresses Republican priorities,” said Shelby, top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Since the government’s fiscal year began last Oct. 1, agencies have been running on spending levels approved during Donald Trump’s final weeks in the White House. Congress has approved three short-term bills since then keeping agency doors open.
The Horn editorial team and The Associated Press contributed to this article.