WASHINGTON — After lurching back to the House floor Wednesday, the House speaker’s six-month continuing resolution again failed to rally enough support to pass the chamber.
The bill went down 202-220, with 14 Republican holdouts, two Republicans voting present and three Democratic supporters. It was mostly clean for the Department of Energy, aside from an anomaly that would have granted the agency permission “to sustain specialized security activities” for its defense nuclear programs.
It was the second time in as many weeks that the Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) unsuccessfully gambled that the bill’s combination of pushing a spending debate beyond the next president’s inauguration and requiring tough new voter ID laws would turn out Republican support.
Former President Donald Trump (R) on Wednesday again urged House Republicans to shut the government down if they do not get the voter ID laws included with any stopgap budget.
The House on Wednesday had seven more scheduled workdays, including Mondays and Fridays, when votes are rare, to pass some kind of emergency funding bill to prevent a partial government shutdown on Oct. 1.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) this week said Democrats in the upper chamber would accept only a three-month stopgap that adhered to the spending levels Schumer and Johnson agreed to earlier this year.
Though he voted for the six-month spending deal on Wednesday, Rep. Charles Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), DOE’s head appropriator in the House, said he would have preferred a shorter-term bill.
On Wednesday, a day after he told an industry gathering that he wanted a three-month continuing resolution, Fleischmann told the Monitor that while the “shortest possible time” for a continuing resolution is “optimum,” and that “in an ideal world” Congress would pass a budget at the beginning of the fiscal year, Johnson’s bill was “preferable to shutting the government down.”
Any clean continuing resolution would leave DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy with a little more funding than the White House requested for fiscal 2025.
The Nuclear Energy Office has a budget of a little less than $1.7 billion for fiscal year 2024. The White House requested about $1.6 billion for fiscal year 2025.
The House wanted to exceed the request for fiscal 2025, recommending $1.8 billion for the coming fiscal year. Most of that was for unrequested increases to advanced nuclear energy programs. Senate appropriators, meanwhile, provided about what President Joe Biden (D) asked.
Sarah Salem contributed to this report from Washington.
