After House leadership said the chamber could vote on a federal spending bill, the leader of the Democrat-controlled Senate said the upper chamber will not pass a six-month extension of 2024 federal budgets.
The House schedule, posted by Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the majority leader, said that “an item related to government funding may be considered” on Wednesday or later.
With about two working weeks left until the end of the government’s 2024 fiscal year, speaker of the Rep. House Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week canceled votes on a six-month continuing resolution that would have frozen federal budgets through March and introduced hardline voter ID rules for federal elections.
Without any Democratic support, Republican resistance to the proposal, favored by hardliners but doubted by some centrists in the conference, tanked the vote.
In a Monday floor speech, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) welcomed that news and laid out some broad terms for getting a spending bill through the Senate in time to avert a partial government shutdown on Oct. 1.
“A six-month timeline is not acceptable,” Schumer said in his speech. He also said that any deal Johnson cuts with his own members “will have to include the spending levels we agreed to earlier this year.”
Schumer called that accord the Schumer-Johnson deal. It largely caps 2024 spending at $1 trillion and preserves federal spending cuts from the deal reached in 2023 by then-Speaker of the House Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Joe Biden (D). Those cuts did not apply to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which was exempted as defense spending.
NNSA under a continuing resolution would get the annualized equivalent of about $24 million: just short of $1 billion less than requested, roughly $1.3 billion less than House Appropriators proposed in a spending bill that the majority’s far right sank on the floor in July and about $1 billion less what what Senate appropriators agreed on in July as part of a bill awaiting a floor vote.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would get the equivalent of $8.5 billion, more than either the $8.4 billion Senate appropriators approved this summer or the $8.3 billion House appropriators proposed. President Joe Biden (D) requested $8.2 billion.
DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy would get about $1.8 billion, about what House Appropriators approved, $100 million above the 2025 request and more than the $1.65 billion Senate appropriators proposed.
