WASHINGTON — House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced Wednesday in Washington that he was pulling his stopgap six-month GOP spending bill that would extend federal agencies’ 2024 budgets from its scheduled House floor vote.
The bill was mostly clean for the Department of Energy aside from an anomaly that grants the agency permission “to sustain specialized security activities” for its defense nuclear programs.
With the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the House, Republicans would need all their members minus three to pass the bill if all Democrats voted against it.
Over the past week, enough Republicans came out against the bill to sink it if it reached the House floor, including Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who told the Monitor that the bill was “crap.”
Extending 2024 budgets would leave DOE’s Office of Environmental Management with the annualized 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.
Two Republican representatives with DOE sites in their districts — Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) with the Oak Ridge Site and Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) with the Hanford site — told the Monitor separately that they would have voted “yes” on the bill. Both said they wanted to avoid a government shutdown.
“I will vote to support the speaker’s bill,” Fleischmann told the Monitor in the speaker’s lobby of the Capitol. “I’m optimistic. Our main goal is to make sure we don’t shut the government down… it’s a work in progress.”
Newhouse concurred separately, but said, “I don’t like CRs.”
“Appropriators are, I think we are way better off to get things done before the end of the year,” Newhouse told the Monitor. “But if this is the plan moving forward, the strategy, I support it.”
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who has the Savannah River Site in his district, was taken to the hospital in Washington Tuesday evening and was not seen on the House floor Wednesday.
Other Republicans took to the website X, including Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), who wrote, “I’m a NO on bankrupting the nation and a YES on election integrity.”
Johnson had attempted to attach the text of a strict voter ID law to the six-month continuing resolution to attract Republicans to the bill, but there are fewer than two months until the presidential election and the leadership of the Democratic-controlled senate opposes the bill’s voter ID provisions.
“The only guarantee in this CR at the Pelosi/COVID emergency spending levels is furtherance to national debt and economic collapse while bankrupting the middle class,” Mills said on X.
If Congress and the White House do not reach an accord on 2025 spending levels by Oct. 1, the federal government will partially shut down.
