Congress is finally back to work this week with yet another funding deadline looming over Capitol Hill. This time around, though, the members are starting things off on a rare positive note. Congressional leaders over the weekend announced that they’ve come to an agreement on the top-line spending amounts that will be divided among the federal government’s various programs and departments.
This is a big deal because House Republicans have been grumbling for months about the deal between former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden during last year’s debt ceiling negotiations. That agreement — passed into law as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act — mandated that the current fiscal year would be funded with an overall spending level of $1.59 trillion. According to Sunday’s announcement, the current fiscal year will now be funded with an overall spending level of $1.59 trillion.
According to Sunday’s announcement, the current fiscal year will now be funded with an overall spending level of $1.59 trillion.
Yes, you read that correctly. There is no substantive difference between the agreement made between Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., despite Johnson’s attempts to say otherwise. It’s the appropriations process version of Vanilla Ice insisting that the beat for “Ice Ice Baby” is entirely different than the bass line to Queen and David Bowie’s hit “Under Pressure.”
Even the way that the money is divided between military and nonmilitary spending is the same as before: $886 billion for the former and $704 billion for the latter. The biggest change of note between the two agreements is that the $20 billion in IRS funding cuts that Biden agreed to have spread out over two years will instead both come in this year’s bill. But Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said that roughly $69 billion in rescissions from IRS spending and money allocated to Covid would be reallocated to other nondefense programs, as McCarthy and Biden had previously agreed to in a side deal.
That there was any real dispute about the top-line number says more about the internal dynamics of the House Republican caucus than anything else. McCarthy and House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger, R-Texas, came under fire from the far right soon after the deal was struck. Under the pressure of the House Freedom Caucus, and with only the slimmest of margins in their majority, the GOP focused on passing (or at least trying to pass) bills that were below the levels put forward, angering Democrats in the process and setting the stage for McCarthy’s removal in September.
Johnson was clearly trying to get ahead of the curve in the messaging guide that he sent to his caucus on Sunday. “As promised, the Speaker negotiated from a position of strength with the Democrat-controlled Senate and White House to deliver the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade,” it boasted. As glad as I am that the deal was struck, this in particular is hilarious on multiple levels.
As glad as I am that the deal was struck, this in particular is hilarious on multiple levels.
First, there’s the aforementioned Vanilla Ice of it all. Second, it’s extremely similar to the language that McCarthy used to try to sell his version of the same agreement to his party, writing in The Wall Street Journal that “the most historic and foundational change is cutting spending year over year for the first time in more than a decade.” And third, both Johnson and McCarthy seem to be completely ignoring the two years that the GOP spent during the Trump administration with control of both the House and Senate — and yet, without a Democratic president to blame, ramped up spending and exploded the deficit.
Johnson’s guidance also speaks to the challenges that he’ll still face when moving forward with turning this agreement from an idea into law — and the hurdles that may still lead to a shutdown. Toward the end of the agreement, he notes that the deal will still allow House Republicans to fight for “policy riders during [the] appropriations process” and “to reprioritize spending within the topline budget.”
What that means in practice is that conservatives will still have plenty of chances to vent their frustrations by trying to attach riders on abortion and other culture war issues to the spending bills as they make their way through the House. That’s been the M.O. throughout the last several months as the far right has been more than willing to tank Republican spending bills that don’t also leave women, minorities, families (or some combination of all three) suffering and less secure. Schumer and Jeffries have warned that they won’t tolerate any “poison pills” in the bills that would tank them, leaving Johnson still squeezed between a rock and a hard place.
That doesn’t have to be the case, but it’s unclear that the House GOP has learned anything from spending the last year punching itself in the face. That they’ve managed to get Democrats to agree to a spending freeze that with inflation actually cuts total spending is a win that they should have been enjoying since last May. Instead, they find themselves right back in the exact same place, much worse for the wear and heavily bruised. We’ve got less than two weeks now to see whether Republicans take the “W” or insist on handing themselves yet another “L” in the form of a government shutdown.